well...that was an afternoon of my life that could have been much better occupied by almost anything. Root canal work springs to mind. At first I half expected to see Leslie Nielsen appear, then it gradually dawned on me that this was supposed to be taken seriously. Half an hour in my eyes began to wander towards our bookshelves and books that hitherto had little appeal suddenly looked tempting (fly fishing for beginners, advanced motor mechanics and so on). The writing on this film is incredibly poor. The key character (Bobby? I had to stop and think about it) has the topography of a millpond. The actors are visibly bemused and are clearly struggling to make anything worthy at all - didn't they READ this script? I can usually pretty much work out what is going to happen in a film and get a kind of perverse thrill out of that - knowing I can't be shocked or surprised (ennui is my middle name) - but with this offering the plot was so easy to read that there wasn't even a thrill to be gained in this sense. The part where the 'cops' (shock surprise) are FOLLOWING THE WRONG CAR made me groan. There are also obvious lifts from other films. The post heist scene is ripped and mangled from (the very good) Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels which unfortunately stimulated a momentary direct comparison of the two films - oh dear. Much other plagiarism is evident which is OK if well done - and after all this is a film in a retro style so should be expected - but this is the sub pass rate night before deadline desperately downloading student of film plagiarism - it grates so much that there was blood running out of the DVD player. James Marsters who plays the central character seems very uncomfortable and out of place. He has 'this is cr*p' written all over his face and it shows. Strangely for someone who had quite a good English accent in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, his native accent is all over the place. In Buffy, his English accent was convincing, although it veered between Olivier's Henry V and Eastender's Peggy Mitchell at times, it was still very good, in this film he paradoxically sounds like an Englishman doing an incredibly bad US accent. JM is a good actor, if a little overdone, but in this movie he gives a poor performance. He doesn't seem convinced by the character and therefore doesn't engage the audience. The plot and actors creak and groan along like a 1970's charabanc to Morecambe (but not as jolly) and come to a shuddering close which is all too predictable. At the end (praise the lord) I felt the need to go and watch something good to get the taste of bad film out of my mouth. Luckily for me almost anything in my collection would suffice in this regard. I would imagine, given the other reviews, that the main actor's substantial fan base will enjoy this film, and fair enough - but try not to overdo the hyperbole, chucks.
Review of Cool Money
