This film has an apt title. It starts out with some life and then chokes to death on its own indolent vomit. Writer/director Jon Keeyes sets up an interesting and multi-layered conflict and then, like he blew a brain fuse or something, he fritters away every last ounce of potential as the movie gets dumber and dumber and dumber until it ends in a twist so cretinous I almost suspect Keeyes let his pet hamster write the last 3 pages of the script.
The story opens with a quartet of gun-wielding robbers storming into the offices of Duca Enterprises and taking all the money in the office's walk in safe. The cops show up before the robbers can escape and one of them is shot to death while the other three seek refuge in a café across the street. Once inside, though, the three remaining robbers and everyone else are taken hostage by two thugs who are much more violent and much stupider than our initial gang of thieves. The thugs couldn't resist the sight of two duffel bags full of money coming into the café just as they were having lunch. Meanwhile, the local cops on the outside of the café have to deal with the interference of the owner of Duca Enterprises, who comes off like a cross between Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazard and the guy with the wings in his hair from the Sopranos, along with an ATF agent who thinks he's living his own personal Quentin Tarantino movie.
Now, it might not blow you away, but that's a cute little set up for a crime flick. There are several different dramatic dynamics established that could each go in different directions. For the first 15 to 20 minutes of Living and Dying, I really wanted to see how the story would end up. Unfortunately, where it went was down the rathole of poor plotting, terrible characterization, some remarkably inconsistent acting from Edward Furlong, a couple of inappropriate European accents and a rape scene that seems to be in the movie solely to satisfy the particular predilection of Jon Keeyes.
This thing flails about with no idea of what it's doing or who the film is focused on. There's a subplot that's so crudely developed it's practically pre-embryonic, yet still manages to blatantly contradict itself. Michael Madsen looks like he's lost at sea, doing that same Michael Madsen shtick he always does but in an almost plaintive manner, as though he's trying to signal someone to rescue him from this mess. Furlong's performance switches about halfway through from trying reasonably hard to not giving a crap about anything. The hero cop of the film, played by Arnold Vosloo, is entirely emasculated and then offered up again to the audience as though they should take him seriously.
Oddly, the best thing about Living and Dying is the acting of Ling Bai. She's best known as a tabloid chick who sort of sustains herself on a level somewhere below Tila Tequila in the pseudo-celebrity ecosystem. Though she's not asked to do a lot here, she's convincing both as a mother driven to crime to get back her daughter and as someone shot in the gut. That is, she's convincing as a gunshot victim until the movie becomes so moronic that it treats her injury like a hangnail.
After a promising beginning, this film turns into garbage
and it's a more annoying sort of garbage for having started off decently. Unless you need to buck up your self-image by watching a movie made by someone obviously more feeble-witted than you are
give this one a pass.
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