The Pinch, 2018.
Directed by Ashley Scott Meyers.
Starring Gunner Wright, James Aston Lake, and Candice Bolek.
SYNOPSIS:
A courier of a California crime boss is caught and becomes embroiled in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with him.
Director Ashley Scott Meyers’s The Pinch is an average crime drama with notable highlights and lows. A local crime boss, Kain (Lake) sends his courier Rob (Wright) to drop off a package. Caught by the police, Kain offers Rob, initially, help to relocate and avoid entering into witness protection. However, this is merely a ruse and Kain sends a pair of assassins to kill him. Saying anything more would constitute spoiling the main plot.
The acting is adequate for the genre. The real source of the problem is the script which Meyers wrote. This is a film constantly at war itself. The lighting seems to signal the film is in the noir genre. However, Meyers also cleverly invokes the horror genre at certain points. Still other times the dialogue and action are too silly and delivers a handful of good laughs. In of itself tonal confusion does not make a bad film. But Meyers has not reached the level of a Jordan Peele or David O. Russell to make the most of abrupt shifts in the film’s atmosphere.
The Pinch is just frustrating. The direction and writing are sometimes too competent to make the many mistakes in logic and narrative flow in the film passable but never good enough to make the film stand out. Sometimes the music is too intrusive. Sometimes the music is precise. Sometimes the lighting is dark enough. Sometimes it is too banal. The overall effect is one of woozy confusion as it veers from so-bad-it-is-genuinely-good to simply so-so acting and stunt work.
Whatever else, Meyers is open about her influences with Tarantino and Scorsese utilized often. Meyers is wise enough to keep the camera steady and moves it carefully. The sound, for the most part, does what it should in setting the mood. But one really can’t take seriously the tension of Rob being in danger – nor is the audience ever supplied with any reason to sympathize with him. True enough, Rob has a love interest and is married to Gina (Bolek). The set up becomes interestingly only as the plot descends into absurdist territory.
The characters and script onto themselves are too plain to entice the viewer. Wright simply isn’t strong enough of a performer to seduce a viewer in the same way Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill did to make the insanity of living within a criminal culture genuinely intriguing. The plot throws up some genuinely clever turns but narrative tricks aside any longtime fan of crime thrillers will be unimpressed with what the film is attempting.
Thankfully, Meyers spares the audience the cliché of a son or daughter motivating Rob. Nor is Rob, as usual, an alcoholic or drug addict. The script though is laced with constant profanity and tries to keep the drama going with a steady stream of dirty jokes and visual gags. The dialogue is often just too uninspired to match Tarantino’s comic zaniness or over-the-top wackiness. Even the torture scenes steal from Tarantino and yet never reach the comic glory of even Tarantino’s worst work.
Given the basically sound premise, the film should should have either committed to parodying itself to an extreme degree or committed to genuinely advance beyond obvious generic tropes. The sheer lack of charisma among the main cast except for Lake severely limits the watchability of The Pinch. The film is fine given its rather limited ambitions but, in the end, The Pinch will probably be received as too safe and sedate to thrill die-hard fans of crime stories. It is far below the standard set by Christopher Nolan or P.T. Anderson or Bryan Singer and their noir work; but it can be enjoyed as a modest, if unnoteworthy, addition to the huge number of noir films set in California.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Christian Jimenez
