Gutshot Straight has George Eads as a down-on-his-luck poker player in Vegas--is there any other kind in movies?--who is propositioned by a creepy older guy played by Stephen Lang--does he play any other type?--to have sex with his wife. None of that sounds good, and after some shenanigans, Lang ends up dead, and Eads and the wife, played by AnnaLynne McCord, need to figure out what they're going to do. Maybe this is Eads's ticket out of his down-on-his-luck life, or maybe it's the kind of thing that will just get him in deeper. We wouldn't have a movie if it wasn't the latter, and as he gets in deeper, he doesn't know who to trust, so it's going to take all of his poker savvy--plus a little luck--to get himself out of this jam. Hopefully he and his straw fedoras make it out alive.
This was what exactly what you'd think it was, a modern Noir that unfortunately due to the fact that it was made in 2014 instead of 1954 has none of the charm and allure of those films; and because it wasn't made in 1994, it doesn't have the avant garde indie element that gets you through those--plus no Linda Fiorentino, who could take even the most "we've seen this before" Noir and make it compelling. The thing is though, as a Seagal completist--I don't even know if "fan" properly describes me anymore--this is a fascinating entry in his filmography, plus we have other names like Tia Carrere, Vinnie Jones, Loni Love, and Ted Levine to add to the ones I've already mentioned, which makes this slightly more elevated. One area where the film loses me as a Film Noir, is I don't know if George Eads is enough of a patsy, and AnnaLynne McCord enough of a femme fatale. When I think of something like The Last Seduction, the power dynamic between Linda Fiorentino and Peter Berg is evident; but Eads can't bring himself to be that Peter Berg schmuck enough, and McCord isn't Fiorentino enough to compensate. Throw in the creepiness of Lang's character, and now added to a dynamic that's not so compelling between Eads and McCord, I have Lang being so creepy I want to run away from him. Again though, I'm here for the Seagal, and this is enough of an interesting entry for Seagal completists.
We're now at 38 films for Seagal, but the issue is, the only one left is End of a Gun, and that hasn't been free to stream in forever. After that, I guess it's Clementine to get him to 40. Maybe for him Clementine in Koren with no English subs would be worth it for that. Here he plays a mob boss that Eads owes money to. It's the perfect kind of Seagal role, he gets to be all powerful against Eads's groveling for another chance to pay his debts. In looking at his bio, he doesn't have another role or film like this, so in that way this is a fascinating entry. I had it in my bottom five when I discussed Seagal with the guys from Comeuppance on their podcast a few years ago, and on further reflection, I think that's a little harsh, as Seagal has really tested our loyalty in ways much worse than this movie. Speaking of which, in terms of future Seagal reviews, there's also the issue of his True Justice movies, of which I think there's 11. For those who don't know, when Seagal's TV show True Justice was released on DVD, instead of releasing it a set of the episodes, they paired episodes off and packaged them as standalone movies. If I were to do those, we'd be talking about Seagal for the 50 Club. I don't know, maybe just outside the 40 Club is the best place for him instead...
Did you know Steven Lang was creepy? Like I don't know if anyone plays a creepy person better. I think he sits off in a corner at a mostly empty Starbucks, watches as a guy who has seats everywhere to sit, but decides to sit next to the only other person in the place, and says "yeah, that's it right there." Maybe he rides the subway, and when a guy makes sure his stance is wide enough to touch the women sitting on either side of him, unlike the rest of us who think "what a weirdo!" he smiles and says "that's what I'm looking for right there!" Perhaps he goes to the gym, under the guise of working out, but instead watches the guy who thinks the woman that just happens to be on the machine next to him must have a thing for him, and waits for the guy to harass the poor woman who's just trying to get some exercise. "Oh man, when she said 'I already have a boyfriend,' and he acted like he wasn't really into her... oh that's it right there! Why didn't I bring my notebook!" If you're a creep, Stephen Lang is out there somewhere studying you. He has fake female Twitter accounts just hoping you'll send him a DM. "Oh, you have a wife and a daughter, do you? So you just wanna be friends? Of course you do. Everyone just wants to be friends until they DM me a picture of their genitals, and I'm mining your creepiness all the way to my next role as a creepy guy who wants someone to sleep with his wife in front of him." In all seriousness, wouldn't Lang be great as Falwell in the dramatic film version of that scandal? I would watch that as quickly as I watched the Hulu documentary. Here's to you Stephen Lang, turning creepy into an art.
I couldn't believe that this was only our fourth Tia Carrere film on the site, but when I looked over her bio, the DTV stuff she's done doesn't always make it on here. She doesn't have as many action films, at least not DTV ones. She has a small part here as a guy who hits on Eads to get him to buy her a drink, and he stiffs her--all while creepy Stephen Lang watches, ready to get his hooks into Eads. To be honest, I think she would've been better as Lang's wife. She's still a good amount younger than him, but she also has the power to manipulate Eads in a way that could be more Postman Always Rings Twice. In looking over her bio, I don't know how many more films of hers we'll do, but she'll always have some big ones to her credit: Showdown in Little Tokyo, a great episode of The A-Team, and of course the iconic Wayne's World, which put her on the map. She also has a Seagal True Justice two-episode movie, True Justice: Lethal Justice, so maybe we will see her again. Let's hope so, because she's one of the greats, and seeing her in a scant role here just reinforced that.
Speaking of the woman who played Lang's wife, AnnaLynn McCord, we've actually covered a film she's been in before too. Kinda. She did a film called Fired Up, which was about two football players who join the cheerleading team, and hilarity ensues. I called it "Ski School at cheerleading camp." I don't know if you remember at that time, but for films like that that grossed over $10 million at the box office, instead of doing full posts, I gave them a paragraph at the end of another post, in this case the fanny pack spectacular Cyborg Cop. I didn't realize this, but whatever method IMDb uses to gather external reviews, it still caught that paragraph on Fired Up in its net, and it's part of the external reviews for that film. I have no idea how many of those I did, because the reviews on Blogger are listed by the main post, but eventually what I ended up doing was turning those paragraphs into full on Wild Card posts on Fridays, back when I did multiple reviews a week. I always think someday I'll go back through the reviews and catalog things like that, along with replacing the photobucket images (don't get me started on that scam outfit!) with the actual images, and remove all the old broken mattmovieguy HTML links (that one was on me for forgetting to update my card with the domain service), but it just seems so daunting. At the same time, people are constantly finding those old posts, so it would be nice for them to have the same experience as we get now with the new ones.
And with that let's wrap this up. I discovered that as of right now, you can stream this free again on Plex and Vudu. For Seagal completists, I think that's the way to go, and it's worth it for that. I guess if you're a Stephen Lang fan, to see him channel his most creepiness might be a draw too. Either way, free to stream is the way to go if you're venturing in.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2252552
And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
No comments:
Post a Comment