BEFORE: I'm still trying to track down all of the movies that I lost when I turned in "Crashy", my old DVR that made it impossible to watch a TV show without crashing. Now that I think about it, most of the crashes took place when we were trying to watch a show on FOX, like "The Masked Singer" or "Hell's Kitchen", so who knows, maybe the DVR was a liberal and it was trying to tell me something. Anyway there were 40 films I lost in the exchange, they weren't currently running on cable so I could not re-record them on the new device. But since then I've managed to watch or record 16 of those 40, because they either popped up again on cable or they were available streaming somewhere and I was able to work them into the chain. Maybe some of those remaining 24 I'll never be able to watch and/or link to, but I have to try.
Adrien Brody carries over again from "The Brutalist" and I'll follow a different link tomorrow. But hey, I got another Best Picture nominee from last year off my list. After watching "Nickel Boys" and "Conclave" and "A Complete Unknown" I'm halfway there, 5 out of 10. I think at least four of the remaining 5 are available to stream, the linking just hasn't allowed it though.
THE PLOT: Three career criminals find themselves trapped in a warehouse with the law closing in and an even worse threat waiting inside - an unstoppable killer dog.
AFTER: Back on the crime beat after "The Brutalist", this film packs a lot of different crimes into the same film - robbery, drug dealing, illegal gambling and dog-fighting, but those last two are seen only in flashbacks, and then through the eyes of a very big dog. Yes, parts of this were filmed in "Doggo-Vision", probably just a low-held steadicam and a foggy lens, I'm not sure if they color-corrected to match a dog's form of color-blindness, perhaps that would have been too confusing. But we get it, we're seeing flashbacks from all the human characters, we might as well get them from the dog, too.
If you're a dog lover, you may want to avoid this film - obviously the dog-fighting means there were winners and losers, and what happened to the losers, well, it wasn't very nice. I'm sure the American Humane Society monitored everything here, no actual dogs were harmed, but it's still an important part of the plot. Did you know they oversee the safety of about 100,000 animals each year on film and TV sets? I kind of want to know where they draw the line - like obviously horses, dogs (This Adrien Brody chain has been not kind to horses OR dogs...) and cats, got to protect the cats. Chickens? Do they protect chickens on a movie set, if they're there? Humans eat so many chickens each year so I don't know why the ones on movie sets should get special treatment. Bugs? They can't possibly be there to save the bugs, can they? I mean, our natural human inclination is to squash them, because many are dangerous to us, and there are bugs now that the news is actually encouraging kids to step on, lantern flies I think, because they're an invasive species. Spiders? I know we need to protect spiders, because spiders spin webs and catch flies and mosquitoes, so even though I find spiders really creepy I think we need them. We need bees, too, some colonies are dying but if they all go, then plants don't get pollinated and then the human race won't be far behind.
There's a scene in "Bullet Head" with dead fish, like in an aquarium and now I want to know whether the Humane Society on the film set would prevent a filmmaker from killing a couple small fish. I think maybe taking fish out of the ocean and putting them in a small tank in a kid's bedroom might be far more cruel than killing them, especially if the kid never cleans the tank's filters or monitors the PH level of the water. Sure it's a slower death, but for all we know it's more painful than chopping off a fish's head and filleting it for dinner. Just something to think about, the people who wanted us to not buy puppies from pet stores but to adopt from shelters instead should maybe take a look at the other animals in the pet stores, like fish and turtles and snakes, who then all have to live in tiny glass tanks for the rest of their lives, far away from their natural habitats, just for our amusement. And if you buy a snake or a lizard you probably then have to buy live crickets or mice for them to eat, and well, who speaks for the mice and crickets then?
I'm getting off track again. Let's get back to the criminals who steal a safe because they couldn't crack it, or they encountered some other difficulty during the heist, and their getaway driver got shot. The two older thieves blame the younger one, who got distracted by the pharmaceuticals he found during the job, and this somehow led to things going south. But they decide to hide out in a big warehouse, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Well, lots, because their ride can't pick them up until the cops stop searching for them, and inside the warehouse is that giant dog, who they presume is a guard dog of some kind.
Cue up the flashbacks, because the thieves need to pass the time, and the stories all involve pets of some kind. When Gage was a boy he had a hurt puppy that he found and kept in the barn, away from his abusive father. He would bring food home from the school cafeteria to feed the puppy after it healed up, but then I guess on the weekend he had to steal food from the refrigerator, without his father finding out. Yeah, this one doesn't end well. Walker's story is about pulling a heist on Christmas, but finding an empty safe at the pet store because the owner took out all the money to go gambling with, so instead he stole a tank full of fish so the job wouldn't be a total loss, and also he could have a Christmas gift for his young daughter. There's an ironic twist, though, maybe it's not as classy as O. Henry might have penned, but it doesn't really end on a happy note either.
Stacy at least had more luck when he was hired by a chef in Boston to steal two suitcases full of truffles that had been flown into town for a culinary auction, and were kept somewhere in a storage place with 50 units on each floor. To find the truffles Stacy rented out one of those dogs that can hunt down truffles in the wild, and while the security guard was sleeping he walked the dog past every storage unit until it picked up the scent. It took all night and he nearly got caught, but he walked off with the suitcases, so that's as close as we're going to get in this film to any kind of happy ending.
Or is it? In another very "Fargo"-ish sort of plot, nothing really seems to go right for these three thieves, I won't get into all of the details but they figure out that the warehouse is not as abandoned as they thought. They find the money room for the dog-fighting income, and decide that it's probably more than whatever's in the safe that they stole. So it makes more sense to split up the money and part ways, only the gangster in charge returns before they can leave. What follows is a free-for-all between the thieves, the gangsters and the very vicious dog. The gangster, Blue, even has his own story from childhood involving a dog - but it's not a flashback, it's just one that he relates while shooting up the hiding places where Stacy might be.
Again, not going to reveal an ending but it is somewhat ambiguous - you can convince yourself that maybe someone lived to tell their tale, or perhaps it's just a fantasy, or a dream, but as we've learned this past week, you can say that about the ending of just about every movie. Earlier in the movie, the thieves discussed several times that there are only three ways out of their lifestyle, the first is prison, the second is getting killed during a job and the third is walking away, only nobody ever seems interested in walking away. There's always "one more score" or "just a few thousand dollars more" before they plan to quit. Well, they say quitters never win, but I guess maybe they do live longer.
The dog in question here (named "De Niro" in the film) is a type of mastiff, specifically a Perro de Presa Canario, or Canary Mastiff. This is the type of dog that the Canary Islands were named for, they're not named after a bird. The bird we call a canary may therefore have taken its name from a dog, or canine. Verbally this all kind of makes sense when you trace the words back to their Latin root. I knew a guy who ran a film festival on the Canary Islands, and he was impressed that I knew the islands were named after a breed of dogs.
Directed by Paul Solet
Also starring John Malkovich (last seen in "Cut Bank"), Rory Culkin (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Ori Pfeffer (last seen in "The Protégé"), Velizar Binev (ditto), Alexandra Dinu, James Robinson, Jeko Bogoslovov, Deyan Petrov, Jason Francis, Clive Sawyer (last seen in "300: Rise of an Empire"), Kitodar Todorov, Mark Theodore Richards, Tihomir Vinchev, Owen Davis, Dimiter Doichinov and the voice of Josh Ethier.
RATING: 6 out of 10 school buses (why were they there, exactly?)
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