I can understand the appeal of doing a throwback film imitating the teenagers-gone-wild genre of the 1950s. Flicks like Lou Place’s Daddy-O (1958) and William Morgan’s The Violent Years (1956) have taken their places in the pantheon of cult B-movie schlock. But William Friedkin’s Jailbreakers (1994), a kind of updated Bonnie and Clyde story about two teenage lovers on the run, completely misses the mark. I’m sure it was good fun for the actors to run around with vintage leather outfits and mush-mouthed greaser accents. But somewhere amongst all of the f-bombs, graphic violence, and oral sex the deliberate 50s camp disintegrates and reveals the carcass of a boring movie featuring a tepid script and even more tepid direction. The film’s main flaw is the protagonist Angel Norton (Shannen Doherty). She isn’t a good-girl-gone-bad who finds herself in over her head, she’s a bad-girl-gone-worse who takes every opportunity to dodge facing the consequences of her actions. Combine this with the fact that Jailbreakers can’t decide whether to glamorize the crime spree of its teenage leads, thereby making them sympathetic, or condemn them as debased, self-centered crooks and you have a confused, miscalculated misfire that cankers the filmography of one of America’s best contemporary directors.
3/10
No comments:
Post a Comment