This attempt by Swedish filmmakers to create an American-style mystery/thriller is about as poorly put together as your average piece of IKEA furniture. It's functional, but you're always going to want something better.
The plot of this thing is as well-worn and familiar as an old pair of slippers. A guy down on his luck is reunited with his old flame. She's trapped in an abusive marriage with her evil husband. The two former lovers fall back into bed and eventually plot to solve their problems by killing the husband. It all goes wrong and the guy ends up on the run from the cops. There's absolutely nothing in this story you haven't seen before and seen done better. And after coming up with a tale that hasn't one original moment in it, these filmmakers desperately employ flashbacks, music video-style editing and fancy camera tricks to try and slap a stylish veneer on this moldering script. They fail.
The acting in Rancid is the sort of bland, shallow stuff you get when okay actors are given nothing to work with. Matthew Settle is acceptable as Jayson Hayson, one of those incredibly handsome and physically fit writers who only exist in movies. Fay Masterson as Jason's old love Monica is hampered by the fact that her character's only purpose is to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer, but even that can't take away from the fact Masterson's the sort of woman who looks better and better the more you see her. Currie Graham is tries to bring a little something to the two-dimensional character of the evil husband. It's almost as though he's trying to pull off the "I'm in my own movie" thing that Val Kilmer did in Tombstone but he can't quite do it. The only member of the cast that's noticeably sub par is chinless wonder Patrik Ersgard as the cop who happens to be Jason Hayson's old friend. The role is a muddled mess, yet Ersgard somehow manages to be even worse. It's like trying to watch a drunk Danny Devito play Sherlock Holmes.
The writing isn't egregiously bad. The script is just poorly constructed. Some scenes go on too long while others are too short. The movie wastes time with scenes that are unnecessary and then skips over important steps in the plot. There are waaaaay too many characters. The story only needs one cop character, it has four. Jason doesn't have one old love in the script, he's got two. The film's love triangle turns into a rectangle. There's an amazingly tone deaf moment when the movie tries to make a statement about anti-Asian prejudice. It's like the Ersgards never wrote more than the first draft of this screenplay because they were so stunned by their own brilliance. They were mistaken.
This isn't an awful film. I suppose you might enjoy it if you were drunk, zonked out on cough medicine or otherwise impaired. If you're clean and sober, this is one of those movies that is never bad enough to make you stop watching. By the time you get to the end, though, you realize that it was simply a waste of your time.
The plot of this thing is as well-worn and familiar as an old pair of slippers. A guy down on his luck is reunited with his old flame. She's trapped in an abusive marriage with her evil husband. The two former lovers fall back into bed and eventually plot to solve their problems by killing the husband. It all goes wrong and the guy ends up on the run from the cops. There's absolutely nothing in this story you haven't seen before and seen done better. And after coming up with a tale that hasn't one original moment in it, these filmmakers desperately employ flashbacks, music video-style editing and fancy camera tricks to try and slap a stylish veneer on this moldering script. They fail.
The acting in Rancid is the sort of bland, shallow stuff you get when okay actors are given nothing to work with. Matthew Settle is acceptable as Jayson Hayson, one of those incredibly handsome and physically fit writers who only exist in movies. Fay Masterson as Jason's old love Monica is hampered by the fact that her character's only purpose is to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer, but even that can't take away from the fact Masterson's the sort of woman who looks better and better the more you see her. Currie Graham is tries to bring a little something to the two-dimensional character of the evil husband. It's almost as though he's trying to pull off the "I'm in my own movie" thing that Val Kilmer did in Tombstone but he can't quite do it. The only member of the cast that's noticeably sub par is chinless wonder Patrik Ersgard as the cop who happens to be Jason Hayson's old friend. The role is a muddled mess, yet Ersgard somehow manages to be even worse. It's like trying to watch a drunk Danny Devito play Sherlock Holmes.
The writing isn't egregiously bad. The script is just poorly constructed. Some scenes go on too long while others are too short. The movie wastes time with scenes that are unnecessary and then skips over important steps in the plot. There are waaaaay too many characters. The story only needs one cop character, it has four. Jason doesn't have one old love in the script, he's got two. The film's love triangle turns into a rectangle. There's an amazingly tone deaf moment when the movie tries to make a statement about anti-Asian prejudice. It's like the Ersgards never wrote more than the first draft of this screenplay because they were so stunned by their own brilliance. They were mistaken.
This isn't an awful film. I suppose you might enjoy it if you were drunk, zonked out on cough medicine or otherwise impaired. If you're clean and sober, this is one of those movies that is never bad enough to make you stop watching. By the time you get to the end, though, you realize that it was simply a waste of your time.