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#49 - Two Hands
Gregor Jordan, 1999
A young bouncer (Heath Ledger) has to run an errand for a local crime boss (Bryan Brown) but when it goes wrong, he has to try to come up with $10,000 in order to get said crime boss off his back.
Figures that I'd commemorate Australia Day by watching an Australian film - too bad it happens to be a film that I ended up putting very high on my "worst movies" list a few years back. Per my self-imposed challenge to re-watch any film on the list if another user requested that I do so (and they did, of course), I saw that it would be appearing on TV recently so of course I recorded it and proceeded to re-watch it. Now that I've given this film two viewings, let's see how well it handles...
I get that Tarantino's films revolutionised contemporary cinema to the point where every filmmaker and their mum was trying to copy his style, but Two Hands is probably the first instance of a film that feels like it's trying to copy a film that was already trying to copy Tarantino. I originally gave this film guff for being a not-too-original knockoff of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (it doesn't help that the plot of both films boils down to "black comedy about a complete nobody who gets in debt to a crime boss"), but a second viewing has not unveiled any further depth. Even Ledger's retroactive status as an Oscar-winning actor does little to salvage his flat performance as a sensitive young man who gets in with Brown's extremely ocker kingpin because...why not? Also his romantic sub-plot with Rose Byrne's photography-loving country girl - again, it ends up being a question of "why not"? What kind of good movie doesn't have a romantic sub-plot? Hell, the whole question that hangs over this film is "Why not?" How else do you explain the incredibly lazy plot device that is Ledger's character having an undead brother digging himself out of hell who serves to deliver some seriously redundant voice-overs and pop up at random points? The subtle-as-a-flying-brick opening monologue about the yin-yang, complete with his frequent but ultimately ineffective appearances at crucial moments, just serve to make him even less of a helpful spirit than the grandpa from Troll 2, and if Troll 2 does something better than your film then your film has a serious problem.
What makes the "undead brother" sub-plot really stand out is that, for all its badness and redundancy, it is the closest this film gets to offering something remotely interesting. Otherwise, it's an extremely pedestrian affair. Guy attracts the wrath of a serious criminal and tries to make things right with disastrous consequences. So what? Not even his climatic plan to carry out a bank heist with some appropriately foolish cohorts manages to engage, no matter how badly things go wrong. Various sub-plots coincide in order to make everything nice and tidy. That random pair of street urchins towards the start? Of course they end up playing a major part in the storyline. Ultimately, this is a very poor attempt to copy the major trends in late-1990s low-budget/high-reward filmmaking and its sheer ineptitude in virtually every regard still serves to undermine it even now. The fact that it's intended to be a black comedy only serves to ruin what little charm it might have had and as a result it is still one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever had to sit through - and now I've had to sit through it twice.
Gregor Jordan, 1999
A young bouncer (Heath Ledger) has to run an errand for a local crime boss (Bryan Brown) but when it goes wrong, he has to try to come up with $10,000 in order to get said crime boss off his back.
Figures that I'd commemorate Australia Day by watching an Australian film - too bad it happens to be a film that I ended up putting very high on my "worst movies" list a few years back. Per my self-imposed challenge to re-watch any film on the list if another user requested that I do so (and they did, of course), I saw that it would be appearing on TV recently so of course I recorded it and proceeded to re-watch it. Now that I've given this film two viewings, let's see how well it handles...
I get that Tarantino's films revolutionised contemporary cinema to the point where every filmmaker and their mum was trying to copy his style, but Two Hands is probably the first instance of a film that feels like it's trying to copy a film that was already trying to copy Tarantino. I originally gave this film guff for being a not-too-original knockoff of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (it doesn't help that the plot of both films boils down to "black comedy about a complete nobody who gets in debt to a crime boss"), but a second viewing has not unveiled any further depth. Even Ledger's retroactive status as an Oscar-winning actor does little to salvage his flat performance as a sensitive young man who gets in with Brown's extremely ocker kingpin because...why not? Also his romantic sub-plot with Rose Byrne's photography-loving country girl - again, it ends up being a question of "why not"? What kind of good movie doesn't have a romantic sub-plot? Hell, the whole question that hangs over this film is "Why not?" How else do you explain the incredibly lazy plot device that is Ledger's character having an undead brother digging himself out of hell who serves to deliver some seriously redundant voice-overs and pop up at random points? The subtle-as-a-flying-brick opening monologue about the yin-yang, complete with his frequent but ultimately ineffective appearances at crucial moments, just serve to make him even less of a helpful spirit than the grandpa from Troll 2, and if Troll 2 does something better than your film then your film has a serious problem.
What makes the "undead brother" sub-plot really stand out is that, for all its badness and redundancy, it is the closest this film gets to offering something remotely interesting. Otherwise, it's an extremely pedestrian affair. Guy attracts the wrath of a serious criminal and tries to make things right with disastrous consequences. So what? Not even his climatic plan to carry out a bank heist with some appropriately foolish cohorts manages to engage, no matter how badly things go wrong. Various sub-plots coincide in order to make everything nice and tidy. That random pair of street urchins towards the start? Of course they end up playing a major part in the storyline. Ultimately, this is a very poor attempt to copy the major trends in late-1990s low-budget/high-reward filmmaking and its sheer ineptitude in virtually every regard still serves to undermine it even now. The fact that it's intended to be a black comedy only serves to ruin what little charm it might have had and as a result it is still one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever had to sit through - and now I've had to sit through it twice.