Malevolent

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Some films aspire no further than cliché. Though when your eyes fall across the cover of this DVD in your local Blockbuster, the name “Lou Diamond Phillips” splashed all over it as if to say, “Look, quality”, you already know that. Here he’s joined by a fellow gaurantor of something not very good, Kari Wuhrer (nothing too wrong with her acting, she just knows how to pick them). LDP is effectively playing Jim Rockford, a hapless cop with a Seventies sedan whose buddy and mother are both dead. Into this already familiar scenario comes Edoardo Ballerini as a James Mason-style effete/motherloving English villain who is E-V-I-L and, this being a closed world of improbability, it’s probably Ballerini (great name, though, isn’t it?) who killed both mother and friend. So, a battered good guy, a bad guy busting a gut to implicate him in one murder after another, and a bunch of dialogue which includes the lines “I’ve got to ask for your gun” and “You’ve got one hour” (usually in these things the guy gets 24 hours but the budget obviously didn’t stretch that far). The film’s redeeming feature is Ballerini, whose flounce and mince marks him out for some heavy duty bad-guy business in the future, in a film that’s got more of a purpose than just keeping the studio space booked, the crew in work.



 Malevolent – at Amazon

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© Steve Morrissey 2002


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