Double Down (2005)

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Director: Neil Breen

Screenplay: Neil Breen

Cast: Neil Breen as Aaron Brand; Laura Hale as Megan; Mike Brady as the Agent; Robert DiFrancesco as the Agent; Bonnie Carmalt as the Bride; George Kerr as the Old Man; Maynard Mahler as the Father; Rose Mahler as the Mother; Marry Taylor as the Senator; Alan Rogers as the Director of the FBI; Huel Washington as the Homeland Security Director; Bill Frid as the Director of the CIA

My first Neil Breen film: this would've been inevitable as Breen has grown in reputation since making this debut Double Down to today. Notably, hailing from Las Vegas, he's a fringe filmmaker and is held, not my opinion, as a new cult "so bad he's good director" like Ed Wood Jr. He's definitely a one-off, fascinating in that, as an architect who self funded his films until he also started using Kickstarter, he has been growing in his popularity as more people learn of him and see each new film. He's the personification of an outsider filmmaker if there ever was one.

I'll be honest though, whilst I softened on Double Down in hindsight, that the film is a frustrating and "bad" experience to have seen, especially in knowledge that this contains his trademarks to the current day, something I'll have to adapt to or perish from experience each time. The issue is complicated by the fact that a) he always casts himself as the perfect human being, here a super hacker and bio-weapon terrorist who cannot be touched in virtue and talent, and that b) his work is to promote his political ideas. Thankfully, he has ideals anyone could sympathise with; that we should be virtuous and noble, and he has an axe to grind with white collar crime and politics, but whenever he goes into long monologues he suddenly slips into the vague and rambling. Said film Double Down is also vague and rambling from the beginning.

To digest this is a piece, Breen is the ultimate person - he can hack anything, even has programmed a shield over him by satellite to protect himself, which paints an image of Breen having an ego before he apparently cures a young girl with a magic rock halfway through the film, which doesn't make sense in context either. He even possibly meets God, an old man who slips and lands head first on a rock and dies, but that's to be debated. To be honest, even this would be tolerable, the auteur who makes films he's the central star, if he backed it up with a creative imagination. He's not exactly Carmelo Bene, and whilst it's reminiscent of Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991) in the constant scenes of Breen wandering the desert, its neither that either. Least Breen has the bravery, in a symbolic scene naked face down in a pool, to reveal himself to the point you can actually make out his testicles whether that's a good thing or not.

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And he's definitely a poor man's Terence Malick, which is an honest-to-good comparison as it feels like Malick's later post-Tree of Life films in the constant introspective voiceover and a mix of stock footage and attempted symbolic imagery, which involves some dramatic scenes and a lot of Breen wandering the Nevada desert. Some bits are attempted artistry I admire the attempt at trying; as a character with depression and having lost his childhood sweetheart, he'll interact with his childhood self, or the childhood selves with replace them briefly in a shot. Then however there's many scenes of Neil Breen running around the desert shouting "Where are you?" which repeat constantly, or the sequence where he starts screaming like a mad man when, originally planning to shut down Las Vegas for a villainous group, he gets a crisis of faith when he reminds himself he loves being an American. The film even predates the Tree of Life's ending when Breen encounters his dead parents stood on a lake, which just adds to peculiar yet strangely potent comparisons between two American filmmakers with distinct obsessions.

The plot doesn't make sense even in terms of the lead character, Breen going out of his way to have his character donate his gains to charities for children and natural disaster victims, but the gains are from deal involving powdered anthrax in poorly duck taped packages to terrorists, and testing chemicals in lakes and killing the fish. The narration, which truly does evoke Malick in the retrospective and "poetic" dialogue, does descend into the paradoxical as the character goes through a series of vignettes and missions, from an assassination of a newly married couple involving a poisoned strawberry in a glass of champagne to more wandering about the desert. A lot of the film is just the curious life of this figure he plays, who can seemingly pull laptops from being any rock and power them without electricity, eating an amount of tuna I'd even bawk at for potential mercury poisoning, and keeping all the empty cans inexplicably stockpiled in the boot of his car. He also keeps waking up from nightmares on the ground near his car and apparently kept his late love's head in a sleeping bag all this time, but that's normal by his standards.

Double Down is frankly a chore, a fascinating one but one, however, which would be a struggle for most people to sit through. I wouldn't call the film abstract either as, whilst weird, it's such a rambling experience even when it tries to reach a dynamic plot change, where he makes a conference call to many powerful figures and starts stopping his major plan by many smaller ones which still kill people, all entirely depicted in stock footage. I never mentioned he had cybernetic implants, never of use plot wise barring stock footage of real surgery so scratched in the footage used it looks like a Faces of Death moment about to pop in. There's some production value, which has to be credited, seeing Las Vegas in the mid-2000s both production design and fascinating, and Breen is able to even borrow an expensive sports car for one scene so is a bar higher than other no/micro-budget filmmakers in what he can get his hand on.

He's however, someone who proudly says in the credits no one was on lighting, and stages scenes with himself in close-up entirely separate from almost the entirety of his cast, done many times and leading to long monologues about guerrilla warfare to hating white collar crime said but never felt. This'll not be the end for me with this director - because Neil Breen is a real one-off - but throughout this review, I am constantly reminded of the many reasons why it was also a struggle to sit through this film, Double Down a frustrating experience.

Abstract Spectrum: Nonsensical/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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