Post by StevePulaski on Mar 3, 2017 15:18:32 GMT -5
Get the Girl (2017)
Directed by: Eric England
Directed by: Eric England
Rating: ★★½
The poster for Get the Girl promises something a bit different than what its film counterpart actually goes on deliver. Similar to the way Suicide Squad alluded to violent, neon-soaked thrills with its marketing campaign, Get the Girl, judging solely on its poster and trailer, looks like a Purge movie: vibrant, graphic, and artistically potent.
For better or for worse, the film itself is a pretty linear and conventional home-invasion thriller, more in-line with The Purge than, say, The Purge: Election Year. Its promised doses of cartoon lunacy come into play only sporadically, however, rather than remaining consistent over the course of the film, making for an only marginally realized premise with only occasional bouts of unbridled craziness.
We focus on Clarence (Justin Dobles), a wealthy but socially inept soul, who drives a fancy car but can't even bring himself to have a coherent conversation with a pretty woman, in particular, a bartender named Alexandra (Elizabeth Whitson). He comes to her bar every night, though she doesn't pay any attention to him nor his lukewarm attempts at flirting. He winds up stuffing the pockets of Patrick (Noah Segan), a suave regular at the bar, in hopes that he'll give him pointers that will help him not only be more assured in social situations, but get a chance to date Alexandra.
Clarence, in a move of pure stupidity, decides to stage a kidnapping involve Alexandra by Patrick and several of his goons. The plan involves both Clarence and Alexandra being taken to Clarence's home, with Clarence emerging as the hero in due time so that Alexandra sees he's the man she's always wanted. Of course, this sounds not only too good to be true, but far too easy as well.
When the kidnapping is set into motion, we find that Get the Girl has a fascinating dichotomy of partly being structured like a conventional buddy comedy and the other half being a home-invasion thriller. Writer/director Eric England uses the former to craft a certain aura for the latter, one that's a bit light-hearted up until the realization Clarence has that his actions have caused a lot more harm than he had initially conceived. England doesn't stop once the comedy crosses over to suspense, however. He makes it a priority to sprinkle in a few narrative snags along the way to keep us alert and to make the experience that much more unpredictable.
The ultimate problem is that Get the Girl struggles to maintain any kind of intensity because it isn't very compelling visually, nor do its characters give us anything other than disengaged archetypes. Clarence is such a vanilla character that the film, as a result, is weighed disproportionately on Patrick's shoulders in order to try and make things more intense. To his credit, Noah Segan works well as the antagonist here, providing the film with a lot of suspense on the weight of his words and demeanor more-so than his actions.
England is always careful to keep audiences engaged even with the simplest premises that seem like a linear ordeal from the moment you read the plot synopsis. His film Contracted was a surprising little deviation from the genre of shock horror, paced well to the point of being mindfully constructed and gory in a way that proved to be artful. Get the Girl feels like it's almost there in terms of being a successful B-movie in the vein of genre-films gone past, but its too visually indistinct and disengaging with its mostly basic roster of characters.
Starring: Justin Dobles, Elizabeth Whitson, and Noah Segan. Directed by: Eric England.