'Shangri-La Suite' Film Review

Two young lovers go on a killing spree with Elvis (played by Ron Livingston) as their final target in Eddie O'Keefe's debut.

Two hot young lovers on the run take up arms against an uncomprehending grown-up world in Shangri-La Suite, and if that sounds familiar, well, that's probably the idea: Eddie O'Keefe's debut feature overflows with so many references large and small to other sex-and-guns romances that even the element that might set it apart — these killers are crossing the country to slay Elvis Presley — looks like a twisted ripoff of Elvis obsessions in Wild at Heart and True Romance. A pastiche that never really breathes life into its faux-exploitation-flick construct, the pic gets a surprisingly strong cast to play along, but will struggle to attract attention even on small screens.

Luke Grimes and Emily Browning play Jack and Karen, who meet in a rehab center. Using a voiceover by Burt Reynolds and a series of quick-cut flashbacks to their troubled childhoods, O'Keefe seems to be nodding to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers while using characters drawn equally from Badlands. But the movie's tone soon settles into a straighter evocation of 1970s grindhouse cinema, one that explains an intentionally wooden performance by Alan Tudyk as the psychologist whose groping of Karen initiates the couple's violent escape and road trip.

Jack reveals that the ghost of his mother appeared to him during a mescaline trip, ordering him to kill his hero — Presley, who by the time of this 1974 story is a bloated and drugged-out shadow of himself. So the two embark on a predictable picaresque in the direction of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the film displays sympathy for the fallen King by showing Presley's hazy attempts to get himself together for his latest tour. As Elvis, Ron Livingston steers clear of caricature and doesn't lay the drawl on too thick, but he finds it hard to conjure the icon's personality; joined by John Carroll Lynch's similarly restrained Colonel Tom Parker, he seems to be trusting that the script's meager ingredients will somehow be transmogrified by the filmmakers into something greater. Despite some seemingly sincere efforts, that never really happens.

Production companies: Bow and Arrow Entertainment, Haven Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Bona Fide
Cast: Emily Browning, Luke Grimes, Ron Livingston, Alan Tudyk, Burt Reynolds, John Carroll Lynch, Avan Jogia, Ashley Greene
Director: Eddie O'Keefe
Screenwriters: Chris Hutton, Eddie O'Keefe
Producers: Tariq Merhab, Matthew Perniciaro, Michael Sherman
Executive producers: Mauricio Betancur, Kevin Mann, Giulio Marantonio, Phil Stephenson, Temple Williams
Director of photography: Delaney Teichler
Production designer: Maya Sigel
Costume designer: Alysia Raycraft
Editor: Franklin Peterson
Composer: Mondo Boys
Casting directors: Angela Demo, Barbara J. McCarthy

‘Chief Zabu’ Film Review

Decades after it was shot, and just in time for the presidential election, a comedy about a real estate entrepreneur with vague political aspirations is being released.

Using his birth name, Howard Zuker, as a directorial nom de cinema, actor-producer Zack Norman partnered with Neil Cohen for their helming debut in 1986. Thirty years later, they’ve rescued the shelved project, a comic riff on money and politics, from not-quite-completion, and, with an eye on election-year relevance, dusted it off for a theatrical spin in Los Angeles before its East Coast debut at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.

Chief Zabu, which received its R rating in 1988, is being promoted with the tagline “A New York real estate developer dreams of respect and political influence.” The seemingly prescient Trumpian parallels are no coincidence; one of Norman’s inspirations was New York hospital signage announcing the philanthropy of the candidate’s father.

But the movie has more on its mind than one man’s ambition. Though its mix of the loopy, the broad and the deadpan is uneven, its story of American business designs on a tiny Polynesian nation still has satirical bite.

As the status-seeking developer Ben Sydney, a terrific Allen Garfield leads the ensemble of well-known character actors and less familiar faces. Ben’s particularly Jewish brand of neurotic social climbing often tips into hysteria. When he’s lured into the deal of a lifetime by a smooth swindler named George Dankworth (the late Allan Arbus), he’s sure that he’ll finally have the wealth-induced peace of mind, not to mention the clout, to feel like a real American.

The deal targets Tiburaku, a newly independent island nation whose president, Chief Henri Zabu (Manu Tupou), has traveled to the Big Apple with a delegation in a bid to secure UN membership. The Tiburaku Tourist Bureau’s investor-friendly animated promotional film (created by Mary Cybulski and Barbara Lehman) opens the movie and introduces the fictional country in parody-perfect fashion.

Tupou, who died in 2004, imbues Zabu with a flair for lofty oratory and a soulful gaze, wary and wounded. The movie could have benefited from more interactions between him and the scheming New Yorkers, but the screenplay, credited to the two directors and Nancy Zuker, is concerned mainly with the aspirations and machinations of the story’s ridiculous white guys (and gals), beginning with the half-dozen middle-aged business leaders who gather in a Plaza Hotel suite for Dankworth’s pitch. Having already sold Zabu a bill of goods, he plants sugar-plum visions of road, soft drink and fishing rights in the entrepreneurs’ profit-seeking heads.

Norman (Romancing the Stone) plays Ben’s employee and friend Sammy Brooks, a 46-year-old struggling comedian who’s tired of trying to pass off cramped hovels as “river-view” apartments. Charged with researching Tiburaku for Ben, Sammy spends hours in the pre-internet public library, reading news clippings in which nuclear fallout is a running theme; France, Tiburaku’s former colonizer, has been conducting weapons tests nearby.

But Ben is too dazzled to take Sammy’s findings seriously and instead focuses on charming cash out of the deep pockets of turnpike heir Skip Keisel (Ed Lauter). Ineffectual but not clueless, Skip is eager to shake off his particularly WASP brand of neurosis. He’s still under the thumb of his old man (Joseph Warren), his butler (Ferdinand Mayne) hates him and his wife (Lucianne Buchanan) is wackadoodle and adulterous beneath her suburban propriety.

In the pastel fashions and big hair of the female characters, the movie offers further evidence, not that we needed it, that the politically divisive ’80s was also, hands down, the most horrendous modern decade in American women’s fashion. Those female characters include a vacuously self-involved Hollywood actress (Marianna Hill). The title of her claim-to-fame feature, The Deluded Chimp, could apply to most of the Americans in Chief Zabu. As a colleague of fraudster Dankworth, the mighty Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers) harbors her own hopeful delusions. Least deluded but most enraged is Sammy’s co-worker Linda (Betty Karlen), who feels discriminated against and sidelined by Ben, and hates him even more than the real estate racket.

With their dueling frenzy, Garfield and Norman generate a thoroughly convincing chemistry of agitation, culminating in a jazzy shtick about the percentages of their assumed profits on the Tiburaku deal. His self-importance rising with the heady figures, Garfield’s vocabulary-challenged Ben segues righteously into lip service about the “underpoverished” and, not least, his determination to have “public opinions.”

The humble brags eventually give way to empty blather about democracy, with absurdist digs at the moneyed classes in showbiz and politics hitting a crescendo in a gathering of Beverly Hills grotesques.

Production: Zabu Company

Cast: Allen Garfield, Zack Norman, Allan Arbus, Lucianne Buchanan, Marianna Hill, Betty Karlen, Manu Tupou, Ed Lauter, Joseph Warren, Shirley Stoler, Ferdinand Mayne, Harsh Nayyar, Charles Siegal, Tom Nardini
Directors: Howard Zuker, Neil Cohen
Screenwriters: Neil Cohen, Nancy Zuker, Howard Zuker
Producer: Norman Leigh
Director of photography: Frank Prinzi
Production designers: John Loggia, Tom Surgal
Costume designer: Hali Breindel
Editor: Fima Noveck
Composer: Andrew Asch
Casting: Jessica Parfrey

‘Heaven Will Wait’ (‘Le Ciel attendra’) Film Review

Writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar (‘Once in a Lifetime’) follows two French teenage girls who voluntarily join the ranks of radical Islam.

With the spate of terrorist attacks occurring in Paris and other French cities over the last few years, and with many of those attacks perpetrated by local residents, the recruitment of homegrown Jihadi fighters has recently become a popular subject on both the big and small screen. In films like Made in France, Les Cowboys, Road to Istanbul and the TV movie La Desintegration, filmmakers have tried to explore how young French men and women from all walks of life find themselves indoctrinated by radical Islam, leaving their families in ruin and occasional victims in their wake.

In the femme-centric drama Heaven Will Wait (Le Ciel Attendra), writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar doesn’t so much touch upon this hot-button topic as whack it over the head with a sledgehammer in a film that makes some salient points about why teenage girls could be drawn into the clutches of ISIS recruiters, but does so with little thematic depth or cinematic nuance. Still, it’s effective enough as a sort of middlebrow wake-up call that will definitely impact some viewers — especially parents wondering what their children are doing behind their bedroom doors. (The film’s answer: They’re praying to Mecca!) After a well-received theatrical release in France and stints at Locarno, Toronto and Tokyo, Heaven should see continued attention abroad, with Gaumont already racking up a string of sales in foreign lands.

Crosscutting between three storylines that come together in the final act, Mention-Schaar and co-writer Emilie Freche (The Jews) follow two young protagonists who experience the call to Jihad in mirroring narrative strands. On one side we follow Sonia (Noemie Merlant), a born-again Muslim arrested for trying to pull off an attack in France, after which she goes through a long detox process that slowly transforms her into the girl she once was. And on the other hand there’s Melanie (Naomi Amarger), a studious cello player who meets a recruiter online and gradually falls into his clutches. (There’s a third strand involving a mother (Clotilde Courau) suffering from the absence of her daughter, with the director deliberately holding back key information despite the obvious connection she has to one of the main characters.)

While there is a documentary-style approach to certain sequences — particularly those involving therapy sessions led by real-life indoctrination expert Dounia Bouzar — the way that Mention-Schaar dramatizes these young girls’ lives often comes across as grossly deliberate and borderline ridiculous. In one scene, the highly susceptible Melanie sends texts to her Muslim “prince,” as she calls the unseen Islamist recruiter, while her teacher reads aloud an anti-religious diatribe by Guy de Maupassant. And in a series of over-the-top domestic spats, Sonia, who is on house arrest and at the mercy of her helpless parents (Sandrine Bonnaire, Zinedine Soualem), is seen going through severe Jihadi withdrawal, murmuring prayers, wandering about comatose, turning her sheet into a headscarf, screaming, crying, clutching at the walls and cursing. It feels like at any second, her head will do a 360 like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. 

Mention-Schaar may be the least subtle French filmmaker currently working in this semi-art house vein, relying primarily on close-ups because she has no real sense of staging, and capturing ripped-from-the-headlines tales in ways that both jolt and comfort the audience. (Her last film, the breakout hit Once in a Lifetime, dealt with banlieue kids learning important lessons from the Holocaust, including a scene where they hear the horror stories of an actual survivor.) As a concerned citizen, she deserves credit for tackling subjects that are constantly in the news and on everyone’s mind, but as a helmer her faux-realist methods seem inherently flawed, substituting easy narrative clichés — in this case, different lives thrown together, then reconciled, by the evil doings of ISIS — for something more ambiguous and provocative.

Certainly, there’s truth to be found in the kind of events depicted in Heaven Will Wait, with reports stating that over the last five or so years, thousands of young French adults have fled their homes to join radical Islamic forces fighting in Syria and elsewhere. But transforming such events into credible fiction is another matter, and despite hard-hitting performances — especially from leads Merlant and Amarger, who throw themselves full-throttle into difficult roles — the filmmakers ultimately turn a deeply complex phenomenon into what feels like a gratifying movie-of-the-week.

Production companies: Willow Films, UGS Images, France 2 Cinema
Cast: Noemie Merlant, Naomi Amarger, Sandrine Bonnaire, Clotilde Courau, Zinedine Soualem, Dounia Bouzar
Director-producer: Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar
Screenwriters: Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, Emilie Freche
Executive producer: Philippe Saal
Director of photography: Myriam Vinocour
Production designer: Valerie Faynot
Costume designer: Virginie Alba
Editor: Benoit Quinon
Casting directors: Marie France Michel, Christophe Istier
Sales: Gaumont

In French

‘A Wedding’ (Noces) Film Review

Writer-director Stephan Streker was inspired by true events in this tale of a Pakistani family torn apart by their daughter’s desire to break free of their grasp.

A slow-burning, skillfully performed study of family malaise and religious subjugation, Stephan Streker’s A Wedding (Noces) follows a young Pakistani girl living in Belgium who’s forced into an arranged marriage by her deeply traditional parents.

Featuring a superb international cast that includes newcomer Lina El Arabi in the lead role, Sebastien Houbani (Geronimo) as her domineering brother and Iranian actor Babak Karimi (A Separation, The Salesman) as a father blinded by his own orthodox convictions, this intimately probing drama has already received prizes during its festival run in France, with international premieres in Toronto and Rome. European theatrical bids for this co-production are certain, while overseas art houses may want to pay this Wedding a visit.

First seen at a doctor’s office discussing a possible abortion, Zahira (El Arabi) is a rather pugnacious and self-assured college student living with her Muslim Pakistani parents (Karimi and Neena Kulkarni) and brother, Amir (Houbani), in a quiet Belgian suburb. Like most girls her age — including her childhood best friend, Aurora (Alice de Lencquesaing) — she wants to be able make her own choices in life, including which boys she can date and what she may eventually do for a career.

But Zahira’s father and mother have other plans for her, offering her the sole option of choosing between three possible candidates she will be obliged to marry back in their native Pakistan. And although the lucky winner (Harmandeep Palminder, memorable in the coming-of-age immigrant drama Young Tiger) seems like a nice enough guy, he and the whole idea of marriage are far from Zahira’s mind, especially after she falls for a local mechanic (Zacharie Chasseraiud) who offers her a possible way out.

Set primarily within the confines of Zahira’s apartment and her father’s modest grocery store, A Wedding has a chamber piece feel to it that grows increasingly claustrophobic as our heroine’s options start to run out. The drab Belgian backdrops, not to mention the overwhelming feeling of family oppression, bring to mind the work of Joachim Lafosse — especially his ripped-from-the-headlines drama Our Children, which also dealt with a young woman crushed by a relentless patriarch.

The difference here is in Streker’s depiction of Zahira’s father, Mansoor, show to be a kindhearted man who can’t escape the weight of deep-rooted traditions, and is willing to lose everything to prove that his beliefs have not been thwarted by life in Europe. The scene where Mansoor confronts Andre (Dardenne brothers stalwart Olivier Gourmet), the father of Aurora and a longtime family friend, is among the film’s finest, with Karimi channeling both the stubbornness and despair of a father who refuses to allow his daughter to slip away from him, less out of love than out of pride.

El Arabi and Houbani also are excellent as siblings whose relationship becomes severely strained by Zahira’s decision to stray from her family’s chosen path, with the devout and troubled Amir forced to do his dad’s bidding when the latter suffers a health scare. If Amir’s ultimate gesture — one that was apparently inspired by true events — seems extreme to say the least, Streker sets the stage for it in a believable way, creating a pressure-cooker atmosphere that boils over when Zahira ultimately decides to stand her ground.

Production company: Daylight Films
Cast: Lina El Arabi, Sebastien Houbani, Babak Karimi, Neena Kulkarni, Olivier Gourmet
Director-screenwriter: Stephan Streker
Producers: Michael Goldberg, Boris Van Gils
Director of photography: Grimm Vandekerckhove
Production designer: Catherine Cosme
Editors: Jerome Guiot, Mathilde Muyard
Casting director: Nilton Martins
Sales: Jour2Fete

In French, Urdu

'Kekszakallu' Film Review

Gaston Solnicki's debut narrative feature abstractly depicts the day-to-day lives of several young Argentine women.

Argentine filmmaker Gaston Solnicki's debut narrative feature Kekszakallu, recently showcased at the New York Film Festival, poses an interesting conundrum for a critic. A plot description for the bewildering, experimental drama feels almost impossible, so I'm going to excerpt from the official synopsis:

"Kékszakállú is an unconventional portrayal of several young women witnessed in immersive yet indeterminate states: within their bodies, among their friends and lovers, and ultimately in a culture of economic and spiritual recession. The torpor of boredom and privilege is undercut by the vicissitudes of Argentina’s economic malaise, forcing the offspring of a vanishing upper class to extricate themselves from the props of familial privilege. The film presents a documentary-like exposure of the quotidian while extending possibilities for redemption among this brood of the weary. Obliquely inspired by Bela Bartok’s sole opera, Kékszakállú radically transposes the portent of Bluebeard’s Castle into something far less recognizable: a tale of generational inertia, situated between the alternating and precisely rendered tableaux of work and repose in Buenos Aires and Punta del Este."

Fortunately, it's easier to get through the film itself than the description, although not by much. The movie depicts the day-to-day lives of several comely young women (often in various states of undress) and the men in their orbit as they experience periods of both recreation and work. The thematic links to Bartok's opera, passages of which are used throughout on the soundtrack, are tenuous at best, inexplicable at worst.

A minimalist, cinematic tone poem, the film eschews narrative structure in favor of attempting to convey the emotional states of its thinly drawn characters as they enter adulthood. The dreamlike images are certainly arresting, whether they're showing the young woman frolicking in a pool, studying for exams, working in a factory or engaging in household activities. The proceedings are marked by a sensuous, tactile quality that, for a while at least, holds your attention even if you don't really know what's going on.

But a little of this sort of thing goes a long way, and despite its brief, 72-minute running time, the lethargic, repetitive film's themes of alienation and ennui are all too easily transferred to the viewer.      

Venue: New York Film Festival
Production companies: Filmy Wiktora, Frutacine
Cast: Laila Maltz, Katia Szechtman, Lara Tarlowski, Natali Maltz, Maria Soldi, Pedro Trocca, Denise Groesman
Director: Gaston Solnicki
Producers: Ivan Eibuszyc, Gaston Solnicki
Directors of photography: Diego Poleri, Fernando Lockett
Editors: Alan Segal, Francisco D'Eufemia
Composer: Bela Bartok

‘Black Crow’ (Siyah Karga) Film Review

Turkish writer-director M. Tayfur Aydin explores the perils faced by an Iranian expat trying to return home in this competition entry from the Antalya Film Festival.

There have been lots of recent films chronicling the arduous journey that people make from the Middle East to Western Europe, but few have followed that trajectory in the opposite direction. That’s probably one of the principal merits of Black Crow (Siyah Karga), a minimalist road movie about an Iranian expat trying to illegally return to her homeland across the mountainous terrains of southeastern Turkey.

Written and directed by M. Tayfur Aydin (The Trace), this bare-bones adventure offers up breathtaking locations that give the viewer a “you are there” kind of experience, and one that is fitfully captured by DP Emre Konuk’s sweeping cinematography. But the lack of absorbing characters and storylines, as well as the withholding of a major plot point until the 11th hour, will make this voyage — which premiered in Istanbul and is now playing competition at the Antalya Film Festival — a tough sell to foreign audiences uninterested in highly austere art house fare.

Sara (Sebnem Hassanisoughi) is an actress who's been exiled in Paris for over 20 years and whose life is suddenly upended when she receives a letter from her estranged father back in Iran. Without explanation, she decides to return home immediately and by the only way she can: across the treacherous mountains of Turkey’s Hakkari Province, a Kurdish-populated region that borders Iraq on one side and Iran on the other, with soldiers constantly patrolling the rugged, snow-capped roads in between.

To help get her across, Sara enlists Yilmaz (Aziz Capkurt), a local who is fluent in both English and Kurdish. The two then set off with a dozen other travelers on foot or by mule, carrying few provisions and relying primarily on instincts to guide them. Most of the group winds up turning back, especially when pinned down by Turkish troops, but Sara persists in her desire to reach Iran at all costs, dragging Yilmaz with her and putting them both in considerable danger along the way.

Filmed on location in Hakkari, Black Crow proves to be an immersive viewing experience at times, especially when Aydin allows the camera to linger on the gray hills stretching into the distance, with the characters dwarfed by the magnificent landscapes. One shot, which reveals a line of oil derricks speckled over the mountaintops, looks so perfect that it could have been created via visual effects, as do a few scenes where mist creeps across the frame in the most cinematic way possible.

the strong imagery does not make up for the fact that Aydin never develops a captivating enough narrative, giving us so little information about Sara that it’s hard to stick by her side for the film's 90-plus minutes. Likewise, the relationship between the actress and her guide, Yilmaz, could have made for an intriguing subplot — and maybe even a romance of sorts — but they hardly talk to one another, with Sara only explaining her backstory during the closing minutes.

Meant to channel the wounds caused by exile and abandon, the final sequences of Black Crowdo have a certain power to them and thankfully avoid any kind of uplifting ending. There are only a few false notes in the English-language performances, as well as in the rather treacly soundtrack, but otherwise Aydin delivers a slow if ambitious portrait of foreign bodies in foreign lands — a quest that's impressive in scope but that lacks a suitable heroine at its core.

Venue: Antalya Film Festival
Production company: MTA Film
Cast: Sebnem Hassanisoughi, Aziz Capkurt, Murat Toprak, Sedat Clum
Director-screenwriter: M. Tayfur Aydin
Producer: Muslum Aydin
Director of photography: Emre Konuk
Production designers: Ayse Abayoglu, Hulya Karakas
Editor-composer: Selim Demirdelen
Sales: MTA Film

In Kurdish, Turkish, English

'It Had to Be You' Film Review

Cristin Milioti plays a 30-year-old woman who rejects her boyfriend's marriage proposal in Sasha Gordon's romantic comedy.

The title of Sasha Gordon's debut feature may be reminiscent of all too many formulaic romantic comedies, but the film offers a nice change of pace from the usual. Here, it's the woman who's afraid of commitment and runs for the hills when the topic of marriage comes up. The reversal may not be earth-shaking, but the plot element is refreshing enough to make It Had to Be You an enjoyable, light-hearted romp.

Of course, having Cristin Milioti in the central role is advantageous all by itself. This presence of the charmingly quirky and adorable performer (familiar from her roles in the Broadway musical Once and TV's How I Met Your Mother) should be required in films of this type. Her looks are unusual enough to warrant her waiflike character's response when told she looks like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday: "Maybe her lesbian cousin."

The story revolves around Sonia (Milioti), an advertising jingle composer in a long-term relationship that's going swimmingly until her beau, the down-to-earth Chris (Dan Soder), proposes.  Although she loves him, the 30-year-old Sonia isn't ready to take that step, and the two break up. That all of her friends are married and some of them are starting to have children makes Sonia feel even worse about her commitment-phobia. In the midst of all this, she keeps spotting a beautiful woman (Rachel York), about whom she spins elaborate scenarios. When Sonia sees the mystery woman reading the book Eat, Pray, Love, it inspires her to travel to Rome in emulation of the book's heroine.

While in Rome—cue the travelogue of scenic locations, accompanied by Nino Rota-style music — Sonia has a fling with a sexy Italian. But things don’t turn out quite as well for her as it did for Julia Roberts in the movie, as she wakes up the next morning to discover that he's robbed her.

For this tale inspired by writer/director Gordon's (a veteran film soundtrack composer) personal experience, Milioti brings a wide-eyed charm to what could easily have been an irritating character. The filmmaker also infuses the frequently raunchy proceedings with a sexual frankness that is thankfully more often funny than tasteless, such as when Sonia's Italian lover takes it upon himself to groom her nether regions.

The film doesn't fully deviate from rom-com conventions. There's the requisite happy ending, for instance, although again, one that's delivered with a new twist. And there are times when the cutesiness becomes a bit forced, especially in the Italy-set scenes. Nevertheless, It Had to Be You ultimately demonstrates enough cleverness and inventiveness to make it more than a by-the-book entry in a genre that's become more than a little stale.

Production: Vandewater Media
Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Cast: Cristin Milioti, Dan Soder, Halley Feiffer, Mark Gessner, Kate Simses, Erica Sweany, Danny Deferari, Kyle Mooney, Rachel York, Nick Mennell
Director/screenwriter/composer: Sasha Gordon
Producers: Rachel Brenna, Richard Arlook, Benjamin Kruger, Levi Abrino, Sasha Gordon, Victor Magro
Executive producer: Chris Columbus
Director of photography: Bobby Webster
Production designer: Kendall Fleisher
Editor: Amanda Laws
Costume designer: Amanda Bujak
Casting: Avy Kaufman
Rated R, 80 minutes

‘Courier X’ Film Review

The real-life explosion of a commercial jet is at the center of a sprawling, globe-spanning conspiracy drama starring Udo Kier.

Courier X might not be “the film the CIA tried to stop,” as its promotional materials claim, but the many-stranded conspiracy drama could’ve been a contender. Placing elements of the agency in a global web of underworld activity, first-time filmmaker Thomas Gulamerian posits that it engineered the 1996 explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800. He offers details both compelling and tedious, without shaping them into a blood-pumping thriller.

The best thing about the feature, which takes its theatrical bow two weeks before segueing to VOD via Gravitas Ventures, is the collection of finely weathered faces among its ensemble of character actors. Along with the strong use of New York locations, they give the film a dramatic weight. Writer-director Gulamerian squanders his raw material, though, in an overload of plot and exposition. More succinct writing and tighter editing could have yielded a solid B picture.

Among the uneven performances, Udo Kier is reliably watchable as a former Stasi officer with ties to the CIA as well as to diamond smuggling. In the title role, first-timer Bron Boier has an ultra-flat affect that might make sense for a mercenary who sees himself as “nothing but the mailman,” but it never stops being distracting. He plays Trenlin Polenski, who travels the globe smuggling diamonds and other contraband in his body. Through his work for Kier’s Nathan Vogel, a “classified asset” of the CIA, he becomes the “neutral” called upon to help bring down Flight 800. The reasons for the agency’s elaborate payback plot to stage an “aviation interruption with no post-visibility” — i.e., to bomb a plane in a way that can’t be detected — are the least plausible aspect of the speculative story.

Gulamerian begins the film with actual news reports of the crash (speaking of distracting, an anchor other than Brian Williams might have been a better choice). From there he moves back in time to introduce various CIA players, including the director (Lee Shepherd) and several agents (James C. Burns, Chris Boas, Ron Gilbert), some of whom are men of conscience and integrity, some deeply compromised.

Included in the film’s male-centric network of high-stakes deceit and big money are a New York mob boss (Gary Francis Hope), his henchmen (John Bianco, Anthony Mangano) and, inevitably, a former Contra (Ralph Guzzo), who blackmails the CIA with sensitive info about its activities in Nicaragua. A more public challenge to the agency arrives in the form of reports by investigative journalist Gary Webb (Jay Disney) purporting its role in the country’s crack epidemic. Brief scenes of Webb have an extraneous, stilted quality. It’s too bad his subplot isn’t better integrated into the story; Gulamerian caps it with footage from the extraordinary town meeting in Los Angeles when the CIA director addressed charges of drug trafficking.

There’s plenty to chew on, and most of the story's threads are grounded in reason. But some are certainly flat. The movie loses its initial sense of mystery and suspense as Gulamerian ploddingly lays out the pieces rather than creating sparks of intriguing connection. His eye for locations and action particulars bodes well for future efforts, though, if he can add a surer grasp of dramatic momentum to his arsenal.

Distributor: Gravitas Ventures
Production: International Artists Agency
Cast: Udo Kier, James C. Burns, Lee Shepherd, Gary Francis Hope, Bron Boier, Iva Stelmak, John Bianco, Ralph Guzzo, Anthony Mangano, Chris Boas, Ron Gilbert, Jay Disney, Richard Gleason, Ben Van Bergen, Andrzej Krukowski, Tom Morrissey
Director-screenwriter-producer: Thomas Gulamerian
Executive producer: Brian David
Directors of photography: Mark Conrad Alkiewicz, Jonathan Dale Bell
Art director: Chris X. Carroll 
Composer: John Avarese