PIT FIGHTER director and veteran stuntman Jesse Johnson assembles an impressive cast led by Raymond Barry for a violent, hard-boiled crime actioner about an aging gangster’s final days.
After a lifetime of playing it safe as a career criminal, Charlie Valentine (Barry) hatches a daring plan to rob a crime boss named Rocco (James Russo). When the plan falls apart amid a hail of bullets and blood, Charlie travels cross country to stay with his estranged son Danny (Michael Weatherly) who works as an enforcer for a strip club owner (Steve Bauer). Charlie teaches his son the ins and outs of being a gangster before plotting to rob another gang boss. Before father and son can enjoy their spoils, Rocco and his men catch up with Charlie, forcing him to choose between saving his own skin as he’s always done or the life of his son.
Like PIT FIGHTER, CHARLIE VALENTINE is shot as an old school crime movie without the cheeky cleverness of a Guy Ritchie movie or the stylized direction of a Pierre Morel movie. Its pedigree could be found amongst 1970s-era, no-nonsense crime films with grit like Joseph Sargent’s THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 and Martin Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS. It aspires to those lofty heights and at times, particularly during the film’s starkly realistic shootouts, it comes close. Likewise, Barry’s performance as an old gangster on his last legs is a commendable A-list effort. Yet in spite of Johnson’s impressive efforts to push the film to transcend its $6 million budgeted limits, it remains bound by the low-budget conventions of typical DTV productions of today where generic warehouses filled with crates and boxes stand in for gangster headquarters and gratuitous shots of pole-dancing strippers in a cheaply dressed club squander precious time better spent on something we haven’t seen endlessly in DTV movies.
What I want to focus on is the action which is something that Johnson really excels at. He’s clearly made a conscious effort to favor realism in his gunplay over style and he pulls it off very well. The key is that there really isn’t much gunplay in the filmic sense. Rather, someone pulls a gun, shoots and the victim goes down in a typically ugly and realistic manner.
The effects of bullets impacting bodies are notoriously wrong in most movies. The physics and blood work are almost always underscored, exaggerated or completely made up to either save money, pass censors or to add visual flair. At one end of the spectrum are bloodless gunshots where a victim simply slumps over as in old Westerns. At the other end are over-the-top excesses such as arterial blood sprays and head explosions in Japanese cinema or wire-pulled knockbacks through sugar glass in Hong Kong cinema.
The make-up effects and their use in shootouts in this film are far superior to most big-budget, mainstream movies when it comes to realism and I’d favorably compare it to the stark realism that filmmakers like Martin Scorsese strive for in their films. In other words, you won’t find any of that crappy computerized blood here.
Acting in CHARLIE VALENTINE is above average for a B-movie with Barry and James Russo turning in the best performances. Barry manages to play a very likable anti-hero and a credible tough guy reminiscent of Terrence Stamp in THE LIMEY. Steve Bauer, of SCARFACE fame and who previously starred in PIT FIGHTER, has his typical weighty presence. Tom Berenger and Keith David, one of my favourite voice and character actors, both have small but complimentary performances. PIT FIGHTER star Dominiquie Vandenberg effectively plays a silent enforcer. The weak link for me is Michael Weatherly as Charlie’s son Danny. He’s not a bad actor but he doesn’t seem to bring anything to the role, but the bigger problem is his character.
The film’s script is good by B-movie standards but isn’t good enough to match the level that Johnson appears to be striving for with his film. There are bits and pieces of character development and dialogue that I feel should be present but are not. For instance, characters played by Weatherly and Berenger appear hollow and lacking in sufficient motivations. Because of this, there’s something intangible missing in the critical relationship between Charlie and his son that I can’t quite identify. We’re meant to care about their relationship but it doesn’t work as well as it should.
There also isn’t enough punctuation on dialogue or scenes in general. The film glides through a number of scenes that could have benefited from punchier lines and more distinctive camera handling or angles. The problem with a film like CHARLIE VALENTINE is that its playing with A-list, mainstream conventions and when it doesn’t maintain this standard, it makes the film look worse than if it had only striven for B-movie standards. Because it takes itself seriously, the enjoyment of this movie rests on the viewer’s ability to disregard the B-movie aspects that crop up and this is something audiences shouldn’t have to do.
The film’s sound is less than ideal. On the version of the film I watched, I could noticeably detect where re-recorded dialogue was patched in because the sound levels were not seamless. The soundtrack is an odd mixture of original scoring in the form of original ambient, classical and hip-hop. The original ambient scoring is complimentary but the rest tends to be overplayed, too loud and clichéd.
All said, CHARLIE VALENTINE shows growth for Jesse Johnson as a filmmaker. While I feel PIT FIGHTER hit its intended mark more accurately, this film is a more mature, sophisticated and ambitious effort that, despite its failings, is still a decent crime film that probably could have hit its mark with a bigger budget and more development time. It’s a vast improvement over Johnson’s made-for-TV sci-fi actioner THE LAST SENTINEL.
CHARLIE VALENTINE has been screening on the film festival circuit but as of February, 2010 remains unreleased on home video.
by Mark PollardRelated Topics:
Charlie Valentine (2009) • Jesse Johnson
- Paul
- http://www.kungfucinema.com Mark Pollard
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