Hantsu x Trash (2015-16)

 

Director: Hisashi Saito

Screenwriter: Keiichirō Ōchi

Based on the manga by Hiyoko Kobayashi

(Voice) Cast: Maaya Uchida as Chisato Hagiwara; Yūma Uchida as Yōhei Hamaji; Kenta Matsumoto as Nakajima; Saki Yamakita as Maki Hayami; Shizuka Itou as Manami Miyoshi; Yurika Kubo as Mai Shinozaki

Ephemeral Waves

 

As an anime fan, as with other mediums and their sub-genres, you do find your coming against tropes which are not defendable. Do not expect a defense here with one of the more prominent ones in anime here, which studio Hoods Entertainment’s Hantsu x Trash really emphasizes, the type of sex comedy which includes content which would be viewed as sexually inappropriate conduct from male characters to female ones. This is however something you do not just find in Japanese animation but found in comedy from other countries, my British heritage bringing up the cases in our past in television and cinema which can be pointed to for this. The tropes in anime are those that have been commonplace - such as male characters peeking at girls in the shower, inappropriate groping and things we have rightly challenged as unacceptable in the modern day as time passed - which would be a struggle to explain to an outsider of the medium to stereotype. By the third episode of this curious straight-to-video fragment, this sadly fully falls into this type of comedy, but I also get an example where, even when I will gladly give the production a kicking for these aspects, I also find material even accidentally working in unexpected ways even if on a morbid level. In this case, like a lot of sex comedies in anime, how many no matter how tasteless feel like a young male character's sexual neurosis as a premise with that the gag to mock.

Deciding to choose this as a subject may surprise some readers, of all the titles to flag up in the non-anime reviews, except that I have always been fascinated by what I have called the "ephemeral" and strange, this an example which cannot be defended for most of its length, but is definitely a "curiosity". From the get-go, there will be the preface now to not have to repeat this, of it being very questionable content. I will also admit finding it fascinating in terms of a sex comedy that did get some morbid laughter from me, not spoken as a hypocrite but that, when it is not about objectifying its female cast, is also however a story about dumb horny men obsessed merely about the bared female breast who are the real butt of the humour. It is tame even in the 2010s when this was released next to what you could get on PornHub and other adult sites even animated, and does present this whilst the punch line is with the male characters being inadequate, pathetic and/or idiots who are punished for their behavior. The punishment is insufficient, even if one character does get a baseball bat up an intimate area, but how much of this feels swashed in the tensions of our lead becomes the central part of this.

It also presents my fascination with dragging up ultra obscure items you the reader may have never heard of, as this is obscure even for anime fandom and is likely not known of at all by many who even know some of the obscurer cult gems in film. These three episodes, two over twelve minutes, the third over fourteen, were just meant to be promotional items, part of a trend of creating tie-in anime that comes with the manga, the first bundled with the 8^th volume of the manga on October 6^th 2015¹, the second bundled with the 10^th volume of the manga in June 6^th 2016², and the third and final one bundled with the 11^th volume of the manga on November 4^th 2016³. Together, they are not politically correct, a sex comedy about the high school male water polo team who is more interested in the female water team, though I will say ahead of time that I have suffered through far more tasteless and sexist content I have unfortunately come across than this. This does feel closer to American sex comedies of the past in tone, only with the presentation of the jokes seen in anime. The issue with this is not the premise but where the humour comes from, in that spying on the female team bathing, as in the third episode, is something that in real life would rightly be challenged. The other part of the humour is more interesting, and becomes more striking in what is barely more than one whole episode of a story which never gets any semblance of a plot until near its end. What little you get here is that these male characters are figures who even find the sight of seeing a bared breast a monumental moment of their life, the kind of joke that transcends history and is not problematic to do as a joke because the target, close to the bone, is the heterosexual males themselves.

The source material was originally published Weekly Young Magazine, originally also the home of the original Akira manga which became the legendary 1988 feature film. It is also a publication that in the 2010s published the likes of Does a Hot Elf Live Next Door to You? (2019–2021) by Meguru Ueno, which just emphasizes that sex sells. Let us get the elephant out of the room that, deliberately including the review outside of the anime sphere, there is a dangerous cliché to dismiss Japanese pop culture like anime for being perverted, where in reality pop culture in many countries, not even touching their fans’ interpretations, have their layers of explicit (or implicit) eroticism or horniness to them. A lot of the dismissal of Japanese pop culture for “perversity” is a red flag for implicit racism, even if we who love anime admit so much of it you would be embarrassed to be caught watching or if more for those with a greater open mindedness to fetishes and comfortable in their sexuality. Factor in too that, in Japan, Studio Ghibli films rule the roost and their longest running animated show, still going since 1969, is Sazae-san, a work by Machiko Hasegawa that follows the titular character, the matriarch of a family, and if about family situations for comedy. These really fetishistic and erotic works in anime and manga, whilst prolific, are an undercurrent to animation, with Hantsu x Trash a real obscurity. Hoods Entertainment made their bread and butter on titles like this, which might not help the argument, but for all the stuff an outsider would raise their eyes at from their catalogue, such as The Qwaser of Stigmata (2010), infamously the animated show about breast milk powering one’s super abilities, we forget that whilst titles like this are brazen and proud to tackle subjects like this, mainstream sex comedy can be as perverse if using humour a self defense mechanism to justify the scenes. Case in point, once ago in my teen years we had American Pie (1999) as a mainstream film, where the title comes as a punch line to someone actually fornicating with a pie as a joke. That film was done with a mocking sense of shame which just differentiates the line between comedic effect and proudly over-the-top sexual fantasies, especially when you consider the most explicit sequence, with actress Shannon Elizabeth as a foreign exchange student who has the prominent nude scene, is presented in the same tone as Hantsu x Trash would have had. That it allows the viewer reveal in the nudity, but ends with a male lead being so out-of-his-depth a potential loss of virginity is as abruptly neutered for him as it could have happened, with his bruised emotional state the joke.

Episode One introduces our protagonist Yōhei Hamaji, a poor guy doomed like many male protagonists in these sex comedies to have a crush on a girl in his school but be under the confused whirlpool of his hormones. He is an archetype that transcends various story types from one country to many, from Japanese animation to US eighties sex comedies, that of a likable prat who is less problematic than his peers, far unscrupulous in their horniness, but still curious about the opposite gender. It is to the point here that if any girl or woman was to show interest to him, his cluelessness will cause him embarrassment in his attraction to them. Like characters in any adolescent romance, his true love is his senpai Chisato Hagiwara⁴, one of the committed members of her water polo team, even if like the other men in his team he has hormones, and like them really has a fixation on the female breast.  This is the fetish of the anime, and these short episodes have no qualms in the slightest in their lewdness, and drawing them in various states, but it also is not that different again from other sex comedies from other countries. In British sex comedy, even in our more tame sex humour, alongside a lot of older and younger men who got bothered by the idea of having sex, many of the jokes with them included a fixation on busty female characters. This is the tamest of things for Hantsu x Trash to have a fetish with, even next to other more extravagantly made and longer anime which, even if not further explicit, a probably more lewd even when there is no nudity. If anything, especially writing this as a heterosexual male writer who can self critique himself, it causes one to look at the obsession with cleavage size by men with a surrealism to it. When you step back, it is peculiar a part of the body of a gender is an obsession symbolically in terms of desire, even in art let alone anime like this gunning for the low hanging jokes.

Episode One shows the trope common in Japanese anime that, whilst still objectifying the women, the men are punished painfully for comedic effect, which has always been a curious side to Japanese anime and manga in their sex comedy in that they constantly undercut their male characters. In work targeting men audiences in their gazes, they depict their stand-ins as completely immature figures a lot of times. Even what could be seen as a gay panic running gag undercuts itself in presentation here, where Yōhei keeps imagining erotic fantasies of Hagi-chan, whilst recuperating in the nurse’s room, only to keep envisioning Nakajima, a team member who looks in his late thirties with sunglasses permanently on, at the end as the one appreciating his caresses. It is the main joke for that episode, whilst for the rest of the three the crisis for him is that, whilst Hagi-Chan is the woman he loves, Yōhei is someone clearly who has both an obsession with large breasts, and is emotionally immature. It is to the point he finds himself coxed whenever any woman, with an ounce of confidence in her desires or an accidental situation, causes the hormones to kick in and turns him into an utter dimwit. What could seen a tasteless homophobic joke in the first episode, with imagining Nakajima every time he fantasies about women in his life, comes off more like a Freudian barrier to Yōhei’s desires, the Super Ego kicking but with an added accidental tone suggesting his denied bisexualility. In a smarter, and more creative anime sex comedy, this would have been a joke that would have been something to run with, here is just due to the strange tone in presenting it without thought to its accidental layers causing my mind to leap to these conclusions. That he loves Hagi-chan for her personality, whilst burning for her physical beauty and curvaceousness, but would not mind buffing his team leader’s nipples even if he tries to deny it. It is for reasons like this I find interest in these less great sex comedy anime, with how for so many even when they come from the crass side, to always objectify the female characters, to go for the crap joke, that there is however a rife amount of psychosexual neurosis to the humour that, if weaponised properly, would be great comedy in another context. That is the one thing that I can appreciate even for something which is quite a cheap production to tie-in to a manga, which does look of its budget in the minimal use of locations, and how the second episode does look the weaker in production in comparison.

One joke from the first episode exemplifies what this could have done if it was not going for the low hanging fruit, the lead’s mind envisioning Chisato being seduced by one of her teammates Shinozaki, someone who is very physical with her friends. In a more complex show than the fragments we got, this would have been compelling, even if tasteless, for imagining the sexual id of a guy who is confused in a lot of ways about his sexuality even if there is one girl he loves dearly. In context it can be viewed as a cheap ploy at lesbianism as a fetish for men than someone’s real sexuality, but could have been a joke that worked in imagining how absurd his desires are, especially as his own superego cock-blocks him every sequence in the first episode, the joke his own disjointed and confused fantasies than at the expense of the female cast. That is as much trying to stretch out a sex gag which most would roll their eyes by excusing it through a layer of amateur interpretation, but that becomes the most interesting thing, even if by accident, through how much of this does follow this. Constantly it becomes a curious gag anime about the strangeness of the male libido, even if the work is not great. It becomes instead less that actual quality of the work which is of interest, but what it accidentally does.

This is still an anime about the male water polo team being perverts, even with episode three having them trying to spy on the female team so Yōhei learn the nipple colour of the woman he loves, which is the episode where I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. It is where the loose string salvaging this anime fully snapped, even if it does led to one male character gets punished by having that baseball bat up a painful area. One recurring joke I will defend in these episodes, because they are all at the expense at the male cast, is the idea they have, because they are all sexually naïve, that they presume just touching a woman in the right way on their breast will cause them to orgasm. Even for a virginal reader of this review, I would hope they realized this is not something that would work; even presuming touching a guy on the chest would have a similar effect should be considered to, because anyone presuming that with the instantaneous effect is being an idiot and a terrible lover. One character who could been seen as problematic nowadays is the female teacher character, neither helping in breaking teaching ethics as in episode two, she even makes a promise to let the male team touch her breasts if they won a match, three seconds only each, and has a desire for Yōhei beyond the boundaries of teacher-student relationships. That set up for episode two, and the disappointment that the entire male water polo team are this stupid to think they can be romantic gods in just touching someone once, is however the one joke even in an un-pc anime which I will defend because it is entirely about her absolute disappointment, and what utter idiots the male characters are portrayed as.

Every time it was entirely when a clear theme was up front as the joke, of how every male character here is as thick as a brick, even Yōhei, is where you see a spark here. It is the kind of premise which, for all the content here with is clichés from previous anime and not aging well, still hits close to home as a joke at mocking the male heterosexual libido. More so, as I have seen titles which have casual edged into sexual violence and far more misogynistic content, this feels more antiquated. Plus with this Super Ego slant to how the joke always punished the male characters, even if the plots here are not defendable and yet reward with their explicitly topless nudity, does make this have a sick sense of humour against the audience who would have wanted these episodes for the casual nudity. Here there is a scene of all the swim team on the floor just from touching their teacher’s breasts, or that she has beaten them all up for not following the three second rule, the exaggeration here of these male character coming off as something itself ridiculous to laugh at, that image in itself the encapsulation of what is clearly the joke but also unintentionally the theme, even a neurosis, running through this.

I have not really even described the visual appearance of this show, and that is for a reason, as it is a cheaper tie-in production, where at times you do see it is a cheaper production. It also barely covers a premise, really a tie-in to the manga for that reasons. A story is hinted at, a romance between a sex fixated Yōhei who yet wishes to be a good person for Chisato, a romantic triangle set up in the finale episode with another girl on the water polo team with a crush on him. Her story is with the added touch though it does play it for a dubious reason; that being her appearance as a physically attracted young woman to boys has caused a huge emotional crisis, undercutting her confidence in herself unless she was able to get past that she stands out physically to men and be able to be self-confident and/or dismiss them. This is another moment that in another anime would have been the right moment to challenge, even in a comedy, the uncomfortable idea of guys even at a young age sadly getting into objectifying the girls in their classes without realizing it in their own clueless hormonal problems. Not many of the cast are set up beyond this, though the premise of a sap like Yōhei trying to balance between water polo and his libido is a premise that could be good, as most could, if focused and were trying for more than clearly here. That this is not really a water polo genre story, and likely is not in the source manga, is itself disappointing because, as a genre hybrid, a sports show combined with absurd sex comedy and romance would work, or least be something really original.  Even if it had stayed perverse and lewd, in a better world, and anime has been able to do this with confidence and without shame, you can have stories which are proudly horny but also emotionally rich and good. It can be to the point they could be dismissed by outsiders to anime as showing the medium as perverted, but in their existence anime can be proudly pro-sex, positive about that and equal opportunity in progressiveness.

The result, just over thirty minutes, could have been cut into a one-off straight to video tie-in, and it feels like a pilot to a series which never came to be, only establishing what is an initial set up. In terms of a comedy, I found aspects funny but with the caveat that this is going to put off someone who, understandably, cannot get past its tone and humour choices. Hantsu x Trash has one scene of a character losing his mind to the point he gropes a female character, which in another context would be offensive even next to the other scenes, but for the most part we are dealing with a type of humour here which has just aged badly. For the rest of this, the idea of someone being so clueless about the opposite gender, males here to women, but attracted to them that they do stupid things like spy on them, is something that can be covered but you could not portray with the same attitude that you still see in some anime like this. It was also something you even saw with 2000s sex comedies I grew up with from the West, even if you played the joke still as the males being idiots, so this problem was always not of just one culture. This particular example evokes a micro-series anime named Colorful (1999), and whilst the question of whether its content is defendable means revisiting it, it’s humour was less sex humour for the sake of sexualizing the female cast, but instead vignettes about men trying to see women in their underwear, or the garments under their clothes, but the jokes entirely about how ridiculous these men were, and the punch lines making them look like morons. Whether that has aged well or not is to debate, but you look to these works which are as much the joke is a guilt reflex of the creators, and they are fascinating even if Hantsu x Trash is very conventional even in the genre.

In the perfect world, these types of sex comedies would not involve this type of sexual harassment humour, and the depictions of sexual content even when kinky would be emphasized in terms of interesting character dynamics, psychological sides even for gags, or even positive depictions of sex. Hoods Entertainment even adapted a manga that would immediately come off as gross fetish material for anyone outside of the anime fan base but had a surprising level of depth to it as a deliberate contrast to this, showing they could do this. It was a work called Mysterious Girlfriend X (2012) about a young man who finds himself in a romantic relationship with a strange girl whose salvia is addictive to him, a strange fetishistic premise turned into a work around this fetish, brazenly, but where you still have a pair who really liked each other and embraced this quirk of the relationship.

You could have expanded Hantsu x Trash away from its questionable sex comedy humour into something as interesting, even if fetishistic, in terms of a sex positive comedy with a lot of goofy humour, but this is a slight production, obscure even by anime fan standards. It managed to produce far more here in typed words than what these thirty plus minutes should have. No premise, unless just undefendable as an idea, is not possible to make into something good and also without being tasteless, and sadly whilst one wishes there was an erotic water polo sex comedy out there which was more wholesome and progressive with this tone, even if still breast fixated, this review also presents another issue found in the Japanese anime industry. That, if you dig, you find so many animated fragments, usually built as tie-ins for manga and in some cases pure one-offs, which never had a conclusion and just exist as half-finished dreams. I can envision imaginary, superior takes on the stories, but the reality is that the actual animation is not this and barely in existence as was the case here.

 

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1) Hantsu x Trash Manga Bundles Original Anime DVD, written by Karen Ressler and published by Anime News Network on August 23^rd 2015.

2) Hantsu x Trash Risque Water Polo Manga Bundles 2nd Original Anime DVD, written by Karen Ressler and published by Anime New Network on April 24^th 2016.

3) Risque Water Polo Manga Hantsu x Trash Bundles 3rd Original Anime DVD, written by Rafael Antonio Pineda and published by Anime News Network on September 9th 2016.

4) Maaya Uchida and Yūma Uchida, the voice actors for these lead characters, are siblings, which is somewhat an odd casting choice as romantic leads. That is not a slight against either of them, Maaya the older sister and both prolific in their careers. It is just an odd choice which I hope they found funny in hindsight to what happens in the show. 

Swordfish (2001)

 

Director: Dominic Sena

Screenplay: Skip Woods

Cast: John Travolta as Gabriel Shear; Hugh Jackman as Stanley Jobson; Halle Berry as Ginger Knowles; Don Cheadle as Agent J.T. Roberts; Sam Shepard as Senator James Reisman; Vinnie Jones as Marco; Drea de Matteo as Melissa; Rudolf Martin as Axl Torvalds

Ephemeral Waves

 

Swordfish takes a huge risk from the first scene, one willingly waving a red flag at the film critics of the time of its release, with John Travolta speaking to the camera about how unrealistic crime films are over an espresso. He even speaks about how even Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is unrealistic despite being an acclaimed film in the genre, [Huge Spoiler for that film] all because Sidney Lumet did not let the bank robbers get away with it [Spoilers End]. Swordfish as I will get into is a ridiculous film, so the brass balls of presumption to have this opening is hilarious, probably with full knowledge of the ridiculous gubbins the film gets into. Swordfish is an absurd film, and if I had to put a finger on why I hated this film once, as one of the worst films I ever saw, it is likely that I once held a stigma against "boring" Hollywood films. This was an era, the golden era of DVD rental stores, where I saw too many when my parents used to rent everything from a Global Video here in my English town. With the one or two weird titles that came through the exceptions to many of the big promoted titles of the 2000s, such as the low budget films which were able to slip in between the big budget films and be rented by accident, I saw a glut of the 2000 to 2005, to 2003 at least in terms of Hollywood. These are the titles, the pre-HD versus Blu-Ray war era of 2006, which lead to me having an allergy to big CGI explosions and remotely any sign the score was dictating the emotional cues in a film.

Swordfish is now an old film, and it presents a transitional period in Hollywood cinema, beginning with its co-producer Joel Silver. Silver would work throughout the 2000s and 2010s onwards, but his golden era is that of the golden age of American action films, from producing Lethal Weapon (1987) to Die Hard (1988), someone who expanded the types of films he was producing in the nineties with titles like The Matrix (1999) earning him success. He was however still returning to the bread-and-butter of his earlier career with action films, the changes to how they were presented how he continued from the eighties with films like the one covered in this review. Swordfish also presents us with a director, Dominic Sena, who came from the lineage of music video directors who were especially making their voices known in the nineties, working with the likes of Janet Jackson. Then there is a screenwriter with a tiny writer career altogether, Skip Woods, who was early within his work here but with the likes of The A-Team (2010), attempting to reboot the legendary eighties TV series, to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), a divisive spin-off in the X-Men superhero series, I can now see where the cartoonish nature of Swordfish comes from. This is not detraction to this film, as the flaws are a greater problem than the tonal choices, but the later films showing where this one was coming from in terms of its screenwriter’s voice. Swordfish has the mentality to throw anything at the wall, even if nonsensical, and it is to the point this can be held responsible for an urban myth of a man being personally executed by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson for treason, which just added a ridiculous cherry on top of this deeply flawed film. In many ways, tame in places but attempting edginess in others, this is a grindhouse exploitation film but on a Hollywood budget, if one with many issues that show blockbusters and exploitation films can share similar issues.

It has a plot, and that I had wrote that with tongue-in-cheek comes from this feeling like a pastiche of crime films, and not a detriment either. Hugh Jackman does find himself in a schism as someone who can played the washed and embittered figure of Stanley Jobson, old enough here to look like an aged renegade who went to prison, and crashed-and-burned after being a cool hot shot, but not as a hacker. It does not capsize his performance, but he feels like the Golden Age of Hollywood star who could never be this person in real life. If he as this character was anyone but a computer hacker, the image and style of performance would work in terms of verisimilitude. As a computer hacker, due to how it is portrayed here, it is up to Jackman's natural charisma to suspend disbelief. He has the virtue of the classical matinee idol, even when his big breakthrough was a 2000s plus phenomenon, the superhero becoming a more respectable casting choices as the films were making money, whose character in any other circumstances would not work if a similar actor like him was cast. Anyone else would have stuck out like a sore thumb, but he can make this matinee take on a hacker work in the same way Cary Grant would have stuck out, as we would have not minded, if dieselpunk was a concept in thirties Hollywood cinema.

The lynchpin that helps with the film to improve it, Jackson's character is a hero willing to commit a major hacking crime to steal millions from the US government, but he does so to earn the money needed to get legal custody of his daughter. In what could be an odd conservative slant, but I think is more a weird quirk of a film that is PG-13 for most of its tone, but prods at the older Joel Silver films which had more R-rated content, the ex-wife has connections in the adult film industry. The ex-wife is a troupe of action cinema anyway from John McClane, here a porn actress with her porn mogul boyfriend with a possible drama in a more complex melodrama even in a blockbuster action film left on the table. One where she is unhappy regardless of her career being porn or not, drinking all the time, in which no matter how she tries to connect to her daughter, her hatred for the husband pushes the adolescent away. Like some Hollywood films, i.e. many, that is not the case and she is an archetype that does cause one to wonder how many screenwriters accidentally showed axes to grind, and in the case of Skip Woods here, may have just taken a troop from films he had seen before. The demonization of porn was an idiosyncratic spin but is so slight it is a weird quirk among many.

More so as, whilst this has moments of adult risqué, factoring the one infamous moment of the film involving the lead actress Halle Berry, playing the femme fatale who brings Jackman into John Travolta's plan, this is a film a world away from a gristly reality. This makes the sudden moments of adult tone more surprising with hindsight, considering Jackman's test for the job is literally attempting to hack the US government's secret website whilst former soccer/football player Vinnie Jones has a gun to his head, and a woman is giving him oral under the work table, flickering of an old R-rated film here and there abrupt when it happens. Most of the film however is a broad over-the-top story; even if there are casualties, including one hostage in the opening at the heist blown up by a contraption she has on, one foot is in the nineties Hollywood mould and one in the new era means that everything is broad, of archetypes and lack of causality. Considering as well hacking is the title premise too, expect none of it to be realistic at all, with actors talking jargon and all meant to look cool in a "cinematic way". It is also less a concern than being a bank heist film, which presents in itself the sense of this film trying to match a new era, where the internet would become more prominent, only to still feel awkward.

The prominence of John Travolta is notable for the tone, and another factor affecting your ability to enjoy this or not is how you gauge his character and performance, the villain Gabriel Shear already idiosyncratic before you have later era Travolta acting interpreting him. I do not mind him here, and actually found him one of the more entertaining aspects, if with a caveat that the performance does expose too much. Travolta, already by this point having played Nicolas Cage, who played him, in John Woo's Face/Off (1997), an example of strange Hollywood cinema when it is done right, can have good scenery chewing. He really was knee capped, even if you do not factor in the controversies of the Church of Scientology, when Battlefield Earth (2000) was released, an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction novel which a) had the controversies of Scientology, from its founder's voice in the text, as an albatross, b) had a drubbing that lasted to the modern day, and c) presented John Travolta as the lead evil alien in dreadlocks, giant platforms and leather costume hamming the performance so much it could turn some vegetarian. The Face/Off reference is appropriate as Travolta could have done a Nicolas Cage, who managed to ride financial debt and mockery to be an unsung hero in terms of committing himself to acting both well and/or so far up to eleven he transcended the mockery. Travolta here, since he is the most prominent aspect of Swordfish, struggles with a sense of self seriousness here, trying to be "cool" in his suits, slicked back hair, taste in expensive coffee and high lofty musings provided by Skip Woods' script. He is meant to be the awesome real anti-hero, but if Nicolas Cage had played this role, it would have worked despite the other problems with the film, whilst there is a sense of artificiality with the performance with Travolta that does undercut this. Despite being one of the memorable aspects for the better with the film, it does accidentally expose something beyond the film to consider with any other performance of his when I encounter it.

The biggest problem with a film like this for all its mad turns, a film about hacking that eventually however leads to a bus of hostages being carried along in the air by a helicopter, entirely in the fantastical more over the top than most fantasy, is one that lead to me being ambivalent to blockbusters from youth. So many, as here, we would dismiss as "mindless" to munch popcorn to, but in truth, for all of us saying we want to have serious profound dramas all the time, most of us just want to have a fun time but with the issue always instead finding something wanting. So many of these films as here you could pluck out cast members and plot points entirely underutilized and see the problem was always that the films skimmed over their most interesting aspects. With the aspects you begin the count being underutilized, the real folly of many blockbusters I dismissed in my youth were where you had weirder, more tantalising premises never fulfilled.

Whatever you think of the acting potential of Vinnie Jones, the notorious Wimbledon F.C. soccer player who was as known for his aggressive on-pitch style as much as for the work he did as a player in a variety of team, he gets little here it is strange he was even cast. Considering the only time you see him stand out, threatening to use rocker launcher ammunition as a suppository on one of the hostages, is just near his end of a role as a generic thug, all the real issues with blockbusters was always the lesser sum of all the parts of their high budgets and casts. The example which stands out is with Halle Berry. It is tasteless to say this, but Swordfish became the film where she as an actress was comfortable going a topless nude scene sunbathing. It only becomes sleazy when reduced to the images of a celebrity as a sexualised object, rather than the actress comfortable committing to the image of eroticism, something you get from the "Mr. Skin" attitude of reducing an actress' entire career to a compilation of her nude scenes out of context, a reference to a real life website that specializes in locating, posting, and rating instances of female nudity in television and film¹. In context, the scene is not tasteless, but plays as a sex comedy bit where Berry, who did the scene to become more confident in her own body onscreen², becomes the figure in control, whilst it is Hugh Jackman who becomes the punch line to the empowered and comfortable woman, even blushing in his character in the moment. Far more insulting with time having past is simply how little Berry actually has to do. It is more egregious your sole female lead has nothing to do, a femme fatale who may be playing both sides but is a blank slate. Even a "dumb" action film could have benefited from what film noir did, the ability to give actresses in these potentially dubious roles meaty performances as compelling figures, something you could see Halle Berry do in what little she has here, but never gets.

Swordfish is okay, where really the issue is of how so many of these films have everything but feel like disparate parts. This is more so the case as, for a film released a few months before the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy and the start of the second Gulf War, one of the more compelling loose ends is the knowledge that Travolta's character is actually a black ops agent, a thief who is stealing his own country's money to fund protecting the country from terrorist threats. This kind of subversive touch, lost in the ballyhoo, could have been something to let breathe and allow this a knowing air of subversion and weirdness. This is more so now, as mentioned in the review, it is likely due to this film, from one glib comment in this film from Travolta about U.S. President Thomas Jefferson personally seeing to a treasonous person, that people thought this actually happened despite the fact the screenwriter clearly added that into the dialogue as a fictitious flourish^{3a & 3b}. This perverse afterlife to the film is weirder than fiction, making one wonder what this series of fragments, proudly as over-the-top as possible, could have been if playing more to these crime tropes fully committed to a mad edge. Far from the worst film ever made nowadays, Swordfish however from my teen years, like many of those films, could have been lodged fully into the memory if it had the courage to go up to eleven than just come off as silly. Face/Off, brought up earlier in this review, was a silly film I first saw in my teenage years, but it is remembered for good reasons, which is not surprising as director John Woo, able to fully unleash his style from his eighties Hong Kong films, came from a style of filmmaking that never let the stranger or even kitsch aspects undercut taking their dramas seriously nor not making the action scenes as inventive as possible. If this got sillier and Travolta got to pontificate more on movies over espressos, Swordfish could have been something more even if it had become a favourite “so-bad-it’s-good” movie for people to talk of on podcasts, but instead what it is cautious as too many of these films are.

 

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1) The nadir of this, which I am amazed was allowed to go forth, is of course when Seth MacFarlane hosted the 2013 Oscars and performed the song We Saw Your Boobs, which came off as a demeaning when, to be honest, a song called "We Saw Your Butt" about male nude scenes might have avoided this by playing to a jovial glee without the gender bias.

2) Halle Berry bares her soul, written by Bruce Kirkland for Canoe.ca, archived from the original published July 11^th 2012, originally published July 20^th 2009.

3a) Execution on the White House Lawn, taken from Monticell.org.

3b) Jefferson still survives, unlike the other guy, written by Anna Berkes for Jefferson Library.wordpress, published November 5th 2008.

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

 

Director: Tony Scott

Screenplay: Shane Black

Cast: Bruce Willis as Joseph Cornelius "Joe" Hallenbeck; Damon Wayans as James "Jimmy" Dix; Chelsea Field as Sarah Hallenbeck; Noble Willingham as Sheldon "Shelly" Marcone; Taylor Negron as Milo; Danielle Harris as Darian Hallenbeck; Halle Berry as Cory; Bruce McGill as Mike Matthews

Ephemeral Waves

 

Shit, we’re being beaten up by the inventor of Scrabble!

I have no idea why I hated The Last Boy Scout back in the day. I guess I was not vibing to these types of action films. We had a lot of them in the family DVD collection, among the early Warner Brothers ones where they released them in cardboard DVD cases, and alongside not really appreciating action films for what they were, I likely dismissed this film outright too for being offensive rather than carefully pinpointing what aged in films from the past. The Last Boy Scout, and Shane Black’s more profane and witty storytelling, vibes for me more now even if arch, part of a solid film from a fascinating era when Hollywood movies could be very adult in tone.

The first scene really is a highlight to a production that, to my surprise, was an absolute nightmare to even get to the finish line as a final production, melding Black’s snark, Tony Scott’s skill as a director, and great Hollywood production value, a grim existential breakdown of a football player who, in the rain during a game, brings a gun on the pitch. And it is Billy Blanks, a wonderful cameo from a b-movie star, usually in martial arts films from this period, which he can be proud of and stands out more as a scene if you recognize him. I come to this film too as an unapologetic Tony Scott defender, always with the sense of him being an underdog even next to his brother Ridley, and that sequence the best in here showing his skill. Top Gun (1986) was propaganda, but it is beautiful to look at whilst the melodramatic and eighties lush tone adds the work where the story and its soundtrack win you. (Even all the jokes about its homoerotic tone (if by accident) adds to this to make it more rewarding). Days of Thunder (1990) is a melodrama, only rather than what were once called “women’s pictures”, it is about male NASCAR racers with Tom Cruise and Michael Rooker’s love-hate relationship as the leads a proto-bromance. The run of films with the likes of Domino (2005) and Déjà vu (2006) that ended Tony Scott’s career, which I need to return to, showed he how interesting a director he was when he went full bore into visual experimentation, some of the most unique of the time and genre, and with Déjà vu’s science fiction premise, producing one of the most unique and mind bending car chases using a form of split screen Brian De Palma would be proud of.

Among these films, The Last Boy Scout is more conventional even next to The Hunger (1983), but this is in mind to how much this film struggled to get finished. Alongside the script from the original Shane Black version being drastically changed, as expected with all script revisions, Damon Wayans and Bruce Willis were hostile to each other, producer Joel Silver steered it to the more conventional action scenes, and Tony Scott’s habit of shooting extensive footage took multiple people to edit it all into final results¹. He however was staying his ground on what he wanted to shoot, so this film if it has an auteur, even if compromised, is his and Shane Black’s together, and you can still see the virtues of both in this. Here Scott is the traditional stylist to a modern day noir, made at a time when Shane Black was a low end in life and feeding off pulp crime paperbacks¹, taking the broken down detective from them and making Joseph Hallenbeck (Willis), the detective at his lowest among others before him crossing with James "Jimmy" Dix (Wayans), a disgraced American football star, finding themselves forced together over one of the former’s protection jobs. This leads to a conspiracy with the US football league and politics, whose flaw in not being fleshed out is explained by how the film went through a long process in being actually completed. There is a lot more cursing than in traditional film noir but humour is literally a self defensive weapon in Shane Black’s world, an effective self defensive maneuver multiple times including “your wife” jokes being able to leave someone defenseless to a broken bottle to the neck. Alongside the setting being Christmas, an obsession for Black, and this feels like his work to the point even Danielle Harris, playing Willis’ thirteen year old daughter, gets one liners.

The interesting thing is knowing, whilst an action film at heart which Joel Silver steered more towards the one liners and action, this has a vein of melancholia in its macho bravado which is explained by the place Shane Black was said to have at the time, one of great depression at a time when he was not part of films with his scripts. This is a film where the one liners are literally self defensive not just to villains but against male anxiety and angst, hiding behind snark to cope through the likes of addiction and the loss of loved ones, With credit to Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans, despite tensions on set, they were two perfect casting choices for a Shane Black script. Willis in particular, in mind to his career’s very erratic history, including the turbulent time even here with Hudson Hawk (1991), is someone capable of a great deal in his roles, someone who could balance pathos and comedy perfectly with his work, taking what was a generic noir protagonist and making him have flesh in this case.

The film would in delicious irony be accused of being woke nowadays. This is lost a little in how much the film plays it safe with car chases and action scenes, the film turned into a production for the box office first, but with Willis’ back story as a secret service agent fired due to a corrupt politician, and corrupt politics and gambling the central themes, it is amazing even if shooting people are the answer in these films how many would not fly in certain parties minds nowadays in how suspicious of authority they are, a film noir trope Shane Black definitely took the heart. Whether it is one of the best of this time is with the caveat that, once you known how nightmarish the production history was, you can see it in the plotting pace, but so much does work. Some of the dialogue is un-pc, which has not aged the film well when they appear, but alongside how rare they are, most of the film shines instead. For a film I was once dismissed, even its inclusions as an action film, including twists involving an unfortunate accident with a helicopter blade, stand out because in spite of the chaos making this film, it gelled together as a rewarding film with too many good one liners, too much interesting pathos and Bruce Willis dancing a jig in the least expected of times.

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1) Who killed The Last Boy Scout? Bruce Willis, Shane Black and the making of an action masterpiece, written by Owen Williams for The Telegraph, published 31st May 2016.

The Football Factory (2004)

 

Director: Nick Love

Screenplay: AJ Lovell

Based on the novel by John King

Cast: Danny Dyer as Tommy Johnson; Frank Harper as Billy Bright; Tamer Hassan as Fred; Roland Manookian as Zeberdee; Neil Maskell as Rod; Dudley Sutton as Bill Farrell; Jamie Foreman as the Cabbie; Tony Denham as Harris; Calum MacNab as Raff; John Junkin as Albert Moss

Ephemeral Waves

 

Jesus, I was expecting cornflakes and a morning wank.

Produced at a time when the likes of FHM and Loaded magazines existed, for a young male demographic in the United Kingdom, post Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (199) adaptation, and produced by Rockstar Games, the British developer at the time when Grand Theft Auto was making waves post Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001) onwards, The Football Factory presents a contentious subject for a film about football (soccer) hooliganism. The opening credits play to this contentiousness with newspaper headlines, but the irony is that, returning to the film, it really is not about the beautiful game in the slightest. All the concerns of this promoting hooliganism from the time come to a film which merely mentions the sport, never shows onscreen games, and is more about a ritualistic world of fans of different teams getting together in an underpass to fight each other, all disillusioned and bored working class men with not much else to do.

My hostility when I first watched the film, back when I was in college at the late 2000s, the NME magazine era of indie bands like the Noisettes and emo to time stamp when this was, was entirely under the immediate presumption to hate The Football Factory for presenting lads being violent and racist. What this is now in the modern day, when those lad magazines with topless model photos are now gone, and films about crime and geezers is not as much of a trend as back then in British cinema, is a film which should have been more braver and transgressive but spends its time trying to be cool. It is a tonal choice which makes no sense as, to an outsider like me, these are desperate characters whose acts of standing in a line in an urban wasteland beating each other up into the hospital, or spending all their money down the pub, is not heroic but tragic. The Football Factory's tone, meant to be heroic but within a grey Britain, is its own worst enemy and the real flaw to something which could have worked. Considering the first brawl has a woman with a pram call it out as idiocy, only to undercut it with Dyer's thoughts that at least it is a good Saturday's activity, the film is clashing with itself. This could have led to something about a world of drugs, brawls, racism and people stuck on council estates as kids, subjects which are deserve their time to be detailed upon even with a chirpy sick sense of humour as this tries to have. With these subjects however, arguably the film is far safer with hindsight than one realises, and at times is being safe to the point it makes certain moments more an issue with hindsight, such as the racist cab driver, a semi-frequent side character that represents all the worst anti-immigrant ideas, who called a wanker and is a butt of jokes but is allowed to spiel monologues without actually tackling why racist cab drivers even exist and what makes them tick.

Context really comes to mind with The Football Factory for me, less nostalgia but more an artefact which brings up a lot of the aesthetic and tone from this time period throughout this movie, seeped within this period and thus difficult to separate without going off into a tangent. This entire period into the 2000s can be seen through this film for me, where one on one side you have the music promoted by Q and NME magazine, some of which scores this film, and on the other side you had the aforementioned lad's magazines, which in tone you can find in all the times the term "bird" come in when describing women the cast are attracted to. It was a time when you saw Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008), about the notorious criminal Charles Bronson, on a Tesco's supermarket DVD shelf with a British Union Jack in the background of the cover, trying visible to sell this type of film to a guy's market of being cool, about crime and men, despite films like Refn's especially being far more complicated in its subject and even style. The most infamous I remember, promoted with Danny Dyer's face on the cover and also spotted in the same Tesco store, was The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), a forgotten work which would have been a disastrous marketing choice to sell on Dyer's popularity pre-EastEnders era; from director Thomas Clay, it was a British entry in the wave of extreme cinema in the 2000s like Irréversible (2002) which pushed extremes including the depiction of rape. These films were finding themselves being slotted to specific audiences even when they probably should have focused on being sold not as crowd pleasers. The Football Factory is no different as a film, in scope a lot more complicated in its themes, particularly as the original novel by John King, his debut, is one I think would be rewarding to read. It comes off as a much more complicated and elaborate piece on this subject and the themes it is tackling, the film feeling like it glances past so many for the briefest of macho cheers.

In the centre of Football Factory too is Nick Love, the director whose career up to American Hero (2015) has moved towards executive producer roles and television, whose work around this time into the 2010s includes work about criminals and remaking Alan Clark's The Firm (1989), another work about football hooliganism. His entire filmography is remotely alien to my own personal interests, which I admit a bias to, but what concerns more with The Football Factory is how there is enough grain of interest here and that, in a twisted irony, a far more misanthropic and transgressive film on this subject, bearing in mind it would have to work around being a novel adaptation, would have been far more successful. It may take risk of being more offensive and being misinterpreted as being pro-hooliganism, but it may have gotten to the themes more successfully if it had pulled them off. It begins with how much heavy lifer Dyer himself has to do in terms of narration, where there are large portions where the term "show don't tell" really would have been necessary even if I have no qualms with narrative heavy films existing. The influence of Trainspotting cannot be denied, but whether you think that film was good or not, it carried with it moments of horror as much as gleefully leant into its world of heroin addicts.

The style is also a clear influence, in spite of the fact that, as mentioned, football barely if tangentially is part of this world. The arranged brawls between teams, with only one full length one actually happening by its ending, are more the existential crisis of working class men, something which also can be seen as a link to the Boyle film in how its down-and-out addicts were miscreants of society. Whilst their arguments they would prefer their drug filled life over a materialistic one were in themselves liable to be challenged as juvenile, the closest thing here is the lowest of hanging fruit, the middle class woman one of the characters dates which is just an excuse to mock the middle class, insult her with sexist language, and really not prod at class biases with anything trying to leave a justifiable scar. The one time the film is catching onto something, but barely covers it, is the elderly character who acts like Tommy's father figure, who is from the source novel. The World War II veteran who now, with his friend, lives in an estate with the only hope for life being Australia, saving his pension, his story raises where this film could have gone. He complicates this film and offers a tantalising subplot barely covered, especially as whilst a war hero, his anger also comes from how, having fought the Fascists, he now has to live in a place where casual racism against minorities happens on the bus in front of him. Played by Dudley Sutton, stealing the film, his contrast to Dyer's Tommy, the surrogate grandson who has willingly given himself into violent hooliganism to compensate the ennui of his life, is something you could have expanded upon.  

The stylisation of the film in itself is also something of its time. I do not mind the almost magical realist tone of Tommy's journey, in which an event in the future returns to him over and over, presided upon by an angel of ill omen with bandages on their face. The attempt at being cool as mentioned however struggles. Miss Lucifer by Primal Scream is a good song, but its use here is less appropriate, meant to be for a fist pumping film when the brawl comes, but in reality about guys struggling in what their lives are even if they try to find it by punching Millwall fans. It is not glamorous in context, and should be more cathartic ugly in tone, especially as there is never a football stand or pitch where these events transpire; likely this is due to the controversial subject matter, and trying to film it, but the grey urban locals and CCTV footage are not what I personally would call "chic" for a edgy hooliganism film. The dark ambient of the score makes more sense, especially as the one fight the film reaches is where all the premonitions of ill omen, shot in grey in an underpass and a brick being used on the skull, transpires alongside the lasting physical damage when it finally comes to be. Examples like this, or the weird use of The Jam's Going Underground, which makes no sense with its politicised lyrics, clearly undercut the film. Like that song clearly being one where people only know of it through singing the chorus, the film really is not as confrontational as it should have been.

This is also aware that, with certain Blu Ray releases of The Football Factory as I had, Nick Love's 1999 short film Love Story shows what he should have stuck to only on a significantly higher budget. A tale of two drug addicts, one a pregnant woman about to have a child, the production restrictions on that film would have worked perfectly for a film about football hooliganism. He has a personal touch, having written that short unlike the theatrical film, dialogue from working class characters who cuss all the time, but is distinct and interesting to hear. The emphasis on Love's dialogue, the c-word up the wazoo, and longer scenes using diegetic sound make more sense to have brought over to The Football Factory, only using the style of the feature film and certain songs like Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes when needed. Love Story, a series of vignettes around this central pair of characters, but also following the likes of a lonely cab driver hiring sex workers or the unexpected cameo of Ewen Bremner, aka. Spud from Trainspotting, could have easily been made into a feature film and a rewarding one, intertwining in this world of the homeless and the poverty class interesting characters. Alongside the prowling camera, spinning around the cast and following them like Nick Love used a wheelchair to carry the film camera on, and it is an admirable work set among the graffiti covered public bathrooms and streets. Considering too its use of licence songs works fully, suitable for the slower tone like electronic musician Surgeon or Portishead's Undenied, and it exposed the real issues with The Football Factory. This is a film whose surfing on what was considered hip for the time would make it a far less interesting and far less brave film than it presumed itself to be.

The Da Vinci Virus (2005)

 

a.k.a. Cup of My Blood

Director: Lance Catania

Screenplay: Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson

Cast: Daniel Patrick Sullivan as Jack Fender; Janina Gavankar as Iona; Allie Smith as Tina; Roger Anderson as Sparky; Lance Mulvaney as Alex; Circus-Szalewski as Nibbles; John Turk as Memoli

Ephemeral Waves

 

The Da Vinci Virus is a film you the reader may have never heard of before. In reality, its real title is Cup of My Blood, a low budget religious suspense film with horror tropes, but I came to this when it was under an entirely different title to ride the coattails of another bigger film, something its director/co-writer Lance Catania probably did not know about for its British release. This is a tradition that has managed to last even into the streaming era, for better and for worse, in that in the past, of taking grindhouse/drive-in films and selling them under new names on the back of big Hollywood films, something which also found its way into the 2000s DVD era here, clearly distributed under a different name for British supermarket sells on DVD to sell off the back of The Da Vinci Code, the 2006 film adaptation of the big Dan Brown novel. With hindsight, there is remotely no connection to Brown's success, controversial and divisive 2003 novel at all, making the act of having read The Da Vinci Code and rewatching the 2006 adaptation starring Tom Hanks pointless. The context is important as, whilst an unofficial "mockbuster" title, this is the context of how I came to this film, and how it once came to be among the "worst I had ever seen", so it is worth establishing my history before returning to this.

For those who do not know, Brown's fiction novel became a huge seller but a controversial one, about a symbologist named Robert Langdon who finds himself in a conspiracy about the truth of Jesus Christ's legacy. It was accused for being blasphemous; it was challenged for the theories it was based on in premise; it was sued for "borrowing" said theories from the non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982); and was challenged as being badly written. It however became a cultural zeitgeist that helped put Dan Brown on the map, and the decision to rename Cup of My Blood into the title I came to it as, when my parents bought it, was likely in mind to the hype behind the 2006 film, directed by Ron Howard and with Tom Hanks playing Langdon. Reading the book, it is fun if you take a pinch of salt every time Brown brings in facts of history and art, pulpy hokum in its page and adapted form. Truthfully, none of it connects at all to Virus, baring the likelihood to albino henchman briefly seen is connected to one from the book tentatively. Whether you think of the Da Vinci Code - love it, loath it, think it is the work of Satan - it does deserve to be canon in pop culture, and I have no shame in enjoying the thing with no expectations, as this pop culture phenomenon that blew up in my adolescence, never reading the tome until for this review, has the pace and tone of naive eyed silliness to it I could appreciate. With mind this segment was meant to be a prologue to the film I covered, only for them to be entirely foreign to each other in premise and tone, The Da Vinci Virus is a film which could have been something interesting as a low budget oddity, and is instead a curious schism of ideas of its own which awkwardly mismatch.

There is, before anyone asks, no references to Leonardo Da Vinci whatsoever in this film, the Italian polymath a huge part to the Da Vinci Code's premise, and the only connection to religion in its apocalyptic premise, which touches on a Book of Revelations style scenario, is the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank at the Last Supper before his crucifixion. It is turned into a MacGuffin here in a curious mix of the profane, religious iconography, discussion about photography clearly of interest to Lance Catania, who beyond this film is primarily a cinematographer, and what he likely brought to the script on a personal level, cheesy horror tropes and a surprising level of sexual explicitness, with a pronounced level of green hue to everything in the DVD version we got in supermarkets.

The Grail is there to heed the apocalypse; with a touch of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones films there is the issue when handling this sacred object as, if the person not chosen to protect it opens the box it is housed in, everyone who does is turned into a (CGI assisted) skeletal husk by the spectres of former protectors. The one chosen to protect this box is Jack (Daniel Patrick Sullivan), a former art gallery/art book photographer who has fallen into being the photographer for a porn website "2nd Cumming", which will later be revealed to be a (not so) secret cover for a religious conspiracy group. This was the aspect I remembered as the most idiosyncratic and likely to still be the most memorable thing of all this film, as that does raise an eyebrow as an idiosyncratic plot choice alongside naming a side character of importance "Nibbles". Jack's career choice, even if he will argue about the virtues of photo film over digital, is trauma over the murder of his girlfriend Tina, who died three years prior to the start of the film and is clearly a more suspect event from the get-go to its cause. Neither helping is that ghosts who have clearly been inspired by the 2000s boom in J-horror, terrified by images of black eyed spooky children and grey undead figures, are haunting him.

The religious may not appreciate the premise, including the mix of sexuality into this, although I should be frank in saying that this is not really a religious film with its apocalypse threat and talk of a chosen, more a secular pulp plot tone that could have changed the Christian iconography to high fantasy tropes and not changed much in the plot, which is one of the huge issues with this. When the double-double crosses and abrupt crucifixions with guts disembowelled out the body transpiring, it would have been appreciated if this had really taken the esoteric route further in referencing real dogma, even if in a profane direction, to make the plot more than the boiler plate one it does become. When it is proclaiming that the Second Coming will actually be by way of binary code, you see what a weird and interesting film this could have been, even as a low budget pulp one, but it feels instead a film which "could have" been this. This feels lost in all the plot it wants to get into, the reason likely I hated this back in the day alongside my dismissive attitude to low budget cinema, when the low budget cinema aesthetic and the clear idiosyncrasies, the sexuality and the obsession with photography, are the more compelling touches. Honestly its interest in sexuality is the one aspect to the film which could have sold it for luridness but actually becomes the most compelling aspect, especially as this is riffing on eroticism as found in photography art books, something distinct as a subject to touch on. Contrasting the porn site's blatantness with the erotic art of Jack, which does evoke real art book productions, even when being blasphemous with the melding of sensuality with Christian iconography you see that, in another world, Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson with the script could have jettisoned the apocalypse plot as this is clearly more interesting to the pair of them. Horror plot themes could have still been in this, of the figure named Iona (Janina Gavankar) who inspires Jack romantically and creatively, with the horror being that she is not who she may seem as the ideal. Even the starkness of the porn shots, actresses bluntly asking which dildo to use, as a nice contrast, whilst keeping the philosophical porn producer with shady criminal edges to him, is a more compelling idea than the conspiracy plot is wrapped within.

The plot itself is ambitious and convoluted, but also with the sense, even if you only had access to some locations including an indoor swimming pool, it feels far less interesting than being in this world of a photographer trying to find himself. In general, whatever budget, I find that the plot structures are less inteteresting than the tropes meant to sell a film, and here you have such a vague religious end of the world scenario, as you might find in a big Hollywood film, that is not interest, which means the Holy Grail or the ghosts to loomed around are of far less interest than the quirks. The gore that is split, some lower budget CGI and some fake guts, feels with a sense that if this had let its hair done and been more indulgent, embracing the absurd tone with its green hued corridors and apartments feeling like liminal spaces, I might have been able to appreciate this more. [Huge Spoiler] When it even pulls the twist Jack killed his own girlfriend by accident, but hid the body and had traumatising amnesia, it cements the curse this decided to put upon itself with trying to follow what is expected as compelling genre thriller tropes than just being indulgent. [Spoilers End]

The irony is that, whilst with little connection to each other, The Da Vinci Code managed to be compelling because for all the controversies about it showing real theories of the true nature of Christ, it was far more interesting as the adventures of the least conventional hero and his quirks, Robert Langdon, in a very over-the-top adventure where the clues and suspense where in the least conventional ways possible, by looking at all paintings and trying to find clues. All pretensions of its real theories was lost to pure old school storytelling when, whether tasteful or not, a Catholic albino monk assassin was brought in, and even Dan Brown's shoehorned attempts at profoundness in the cultural references in the novel had an eccentric charm. With hindsight, it became for me that weird and eccentric work which inexplicably caught fire, rather than stay an obscure work as an idiosyncratic author, and become a megahit. The Da Vinci Virus as I learnt of it as is as brazen in its own way, which I have to admire, part of an era of straight-to-DVD pulp cinema that will eventually get interest for how it led to curiosities like this, but with this one unfortunately a title which took too many clichés from bigger films than ride its own idiosyncrasies.