The SmarK DVD Rant for Hard Cash
– I’d never actually heard of this movie until Derek Burgan sent me the DVD a few months back. It’s from Artisan, masters of the straight-to-video market, but since I’m always up for a heist movie and it had Christian Slater and Val Kilmer as the lead stars, I figured I’d finally get around to giving it a spin.
I found out why I’d never heard of it before.
The Film
First of all, according to IMDB it was originally titled “Run for the Money” and aired on one of the movie channels in the US, and I gotta say that “Hard Cash” is at the very least a better title.
The movie stars Christian Slater as Taylor, a lifelong thief who gets caught robbing the home of a rich guy (William Forsythe, the best actor in the movie, who’s on screen for all of 5 minutes) who apparently REALLY hates Mexicans. Taylor takes the fall for his crew, who escape via the roof, and spends a year in jail for his crime. When he gets out, he seems to have taken a job as an ambulance driver, but it’s just a front for a rather brilliant stickup of an off-track betting place, using a whole new crew.
That’s about where the good ideas on this movie run out.
The crew discovers that, after all their hard work, the 1.9 million dollars they rightfully stole for themselves is in fact federal money, and marked as such. The relationship between the crew members degenerates as no one can wait the 24 hours that it’ll take to launder the money, and even worse, once they go to retrieve it, they find that someone has stolen their stolen money. Slater’s daughter is then kidnapped by Kilmer, completely wasted as a loony and crooked FBI agent trying to break in an idiot partner, because it turns out that he was trying to launder the money that Taylor then stole and tried to launder for himself. But he’ll give the daughter back if Taylor will do one last job for him, a 6 million dollar heist of a casino truck, and from there you get the predictable double-and-triple-crosses and final showdown on a boat.
It’s not so much that this is a bad movie, it’s that it’s a REALLY bad movie. Slater’s girlfriend in the movie is so totally pointless as a character that you just KNOW she has to be some sort of plot device, or else they could have cut her out entirely. Two of the crew — Eddie and Butch — are brothers, although such an important piece of information isn’t even given until nearly an hour into the movie. In fact, in another plot twist that was perhaps a surprise to someone who had never watched an action movie before, it turns out that the girl who always bugs Eddie about never getting laid has in fact been f*cking him regularly, behind his brother’s back. This leads to him yelling out “Who’s the little brother now?” while doing it with her, and without the vital piece of information that he referring to being BUTCH’S little brother, you could take an entirely different meaning from that scene. The chase scenes, whether they be in cars or boats — are embarrassing green-screen and/or rear projection effects, right out of Starsky & Hutch. Maybe it was just the higher resolution of the DVD enhancing the outlines of the actors against the screens, but MAN was it obvious to me and bugged the hell out of me. Most bothersome about the movie is how totally generic and interchangeable all the characters are — Balthazar Getty, as Eddie, is trying to play it like a psycho, but it comes down to him yelling “WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MONEY” every time he’s on screen because he’s got nothing else to work with. The black dude played by Bokeem Woodbine wants to be a rapper, but that’s about all we get from him before he gets iced halfway through the film. The climax of the film expects us to believe that Taylor is such an amazing crook that he can pick a deadbolted door with a playing card, and I’m SORRY, but I can’t suspend my disbelief quite that much. And finally, the climactic heist scene involves them dumping the armored truck into the water and then doing the robbery in scuba gear, which is fine, except that one character turns on another, only to be foiled and stabbed with his own knife. Which character? We don’t KNOW because they’re wearing scuba gear! Eventually it’s revealed who survived, but really who cares when you know everyone’s basically scum except for Taylor and you know they’re all gonna end up dead anyway?
This wasn’t all THAT bad, though. I liked the ending, in that Taylor does something for his daughter (albeit something really stupid) that redeems him somewhat and goes against the usual amoral nature of these movies, where heroes steal millions of dollars and never get caught for doing it. I also liked the totally over-the-top Cuban gangster / Laundromat owner Nikita (Vincent Laresca), who has some hilarious ways of dealing with his problems. And any movie with Verne Troyer as a pervert wins some points with me. And the running gag with Jose, who sells oranges for money, was a funny way to bookend the movie. But as action movies go, this was merely competent in terms of the filmmaking, and didn’t have the script or characters to save it from the low-budget, no imagination mess that fell into the director’s lap. And I have no idea why they bothered getting Val Kilmer for it, either. Now Gary Oldman, that might have had possibilities
The Video
The movie may suck, but it’s a very nice transfer for the most part. You get your choice of anamorphic widescreen (looked about 1.77:1 to me) or full-screen. Colors are bright, blacks are okay although I could see it struggling to handle some of the darker scenes. There’s some dirt and scratches on the negative in a couple of places early in the movie, which is weird for something that wasn’t released in theatres. IMDB says it made $46,000 in Russia, so maybe it was using the Russian theatrical print for the transfer, who knows. Anyway, it’s a very nice transfer regardless.
The Audio
You get either Dolby 5.1 or Dolby 2.0, and they both sounded exactly the same to me. I don’t think my subwoofer even vibrated once during the movie, and I didn’t hear anything coming out the surrounds, even during the occasional gun battles. Total waste of a 5.1 mix.
The Extras
The trailer, nothing else. Not that I was really gung ho to watch a “making of” feature where they show Val Kilmer collecting his cheque and then going home every night anyway.
The Ratings
The Film: *1/2
The Video: ***1/2
The Audio: **
The Extras: ½*
