Rating: C-
Dir: Beau Yotty
Star: Beau Yotty, Katrina F. Kelly, Dan Weisgerber, Lisa Barnes
There are eleven reviews with ratings for this on the IMDb at the time of rating. All of them are either a “1” or a “10”. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before. The former hold a 7-4 edge, but as is almost always the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. This is not Manos: The Hands of Fate, and nor is it Die Hard. Yotty is, however, still looking to recreate the spirit of the eighties, but has moved on from the horror genre, and is now in the “buddy cop” genre, with Lethal Weapon the most obvious touchstone, perhaps even informing the title (although it sounds suspiciously like a restaurant promotion, immediately preceding “Taco Tuesday”). The problem is, Yotty is not exactly Mel Gibson.
It also operates in an awkward spot where it’s try to depict an 80’s attitude without the expense or effort needed for a period setting. It begins with loose cannon cop Detective Mike Roberts (Yotty) storming in to the home of the Mayor of Goldwater, Willy Campbell (Weisgerber), arresting him despite a near-total lack of evidence. This would be dubious in the eighties. Now, the best he could hope for would be a suspension with pay, while Internal Affairs carry out an investigation, regardless of how long-suffering your boss might be. There’s absolutely no sense of the story taking place in the real world, and this persists for the rest of the movie.
Mike’s partner is shot while investigating a burglary, but leaves behind a convenient briefcase of evidence incriminating Mayor Campbell. It’s all utterly inadmissible, but propels Mike, with new, relatively cautious partner Detective Evans (Kelly), on a relentless investigation of Campbell and his wife Anna. In contemporary reality, this would be considered police harassment, and that’s before we see Mike pointing his service revolver at the head of a suspect in his partner’s murder (top), in a police interview room. In the film’s defense, it all unfolds over the course of a single day – Mike’s final line refers to the title: “It’s been one hell of a loaded Monday.” So maybe there wasn’t enough time for any formal objections, though Campbell’s lawyer shows up at the drop of a cease-and-desist.
A bigger problem is Yotty’s complete unsuitability for the role. He just can’t project the necessary sense of being on the edge. When he threatens the suspect, for example, I just wanted to give him a cookie and some orange slices. He’d have been better as the cautious partner, and having a woman as the loose cannon would have been a bit more original too. It doesn’t help that the action scenes are terrible. Probably the only thing worse than the fight between Evans and a minion, is the one shortly after between Roberts and Campbell’s knife-wielding lieutenant. The ending does offer a twist I didn’t see coming, and in a significant improvement, most of the audio here is okay. I think being mostly filmed inside helped. It’s still a long way short of the films which inspired it.