Double Down – 0 out of 5
I like to consider myself a connoisseur
of bad movies. Thanks to discovering
Mystery Science Theater 3000 when it came out (and how awesome is it that it's coming back? Very awesome) and the fact that I was raised to
be a movie nut by my father, I’ve developed a taste for schlocky films. B-movie premises, bad acting and piss-poor
production became the fine cheeses of the movie world that I would regularly
seek out. However, there are a lot of
bad movies out there and I am only one man and just can’t see them all. Thankfully, however, I have friends who will
tell me when one has slipped past my radar.
My buddy Chris over at The Robot’s Pajamas (a website I like to
contribute to and you should check out because it’s awesome) told me about a
film called Double Down and asked me to review it there (which I did and you
can check out here) but this movie was so epically bad that I had to go into
more detail here on my site…if only to keep my sanity.
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| The battery life on his laptops are fucking fantastic in this film! |
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| The possible target of the attack, a stock footage shot of Las Vegas. |
According to IMDb, Double Down is
about a terrorist attack on Las Vegas and a brilliant secret agent (played by
the man who made it; Neil Breen) who takes control of the city and the attack
as he “fights with his fits of overwhelming depression and obsessions with love
and death.” However, if you actually took the time to watch this mess of a
film, you’d have no frickin’ clue what the film was actually about because it is just a meandering mess. What I was able to gather, Double Down is about a Richard Gere stunt
double that is a spy in his down time and doesn’t quite understand morals and
ethics. Sometime after his fiancee is
murder while they were skinny dipping in their pool, he decides to work for any
and every government willing to pay him the big bucks because he is the
greatest hacker/bio-weapons expert/spy/maybe terrorist the world has ever
seen. One day, he is asked to shut down
Las Vegas for two months by some unknown people for some unknown reasons. In-between his wandering around the desert,
eating tuna out of the can, possibly having the ability to cure cancer with
some Fool’s Gold, owning an invisibility shield and other mindless ramblings
this character named Aaron Brand goes on about, he does some very unclear things to get some
sort of attack going and then, with ten minutes left in the film, decides to try
and stop it. (Don’t you dare cry about Spoilers because, as I’ll explain, the
story will NOT be the reason to watch this film.)
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| He has an unfortunate story of a gerbil stunt double. |
Often when I watch movies, I have
a notebook nearby to take notes for the blog or other sites I’m writing
for. With Double Down, I took four pages
of notes and one of the most reoccurring setences I jotted down was “What the hell is
going on in this film?” This movie is a
horrendous mess but it’s not really surprising when you learn how the film came
about. The man who made this film has no
history with film making and made a bunch of money in Las Vegas and decided
that he would use that money to make a film that would support his ego—in a
similar way Tommy Wiseau made The Room or James Nguyen with Birdemic. What follows is a feature that has no sense
of plot, story, character, conflict, intrigue or even the basics of lighting,
acting, camera work, sound, music and editing. In replace of all that, you
have a main character played by the financier and a character treatment that is
all about feeding his own ego. I’m not
kidding, this movie is basically an hour and a half of his character saying how
awesome and talented he is.
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| I'm a bit surprised we don't hear about how he's an award winning sleeper in this film. |
Shit, Breen’s even remote
understanding or even whether or not he’s actually seen a movie has to be
called into question as he clearly misunderstood one of the most basic rules of
storytelling and decides that this film is entirely “Tell, Don’t Show.” I’m not kidding when I say the first 20
minutes of the film is all B-roll of Breen in the desert set to narration about
how badass his character is and, during this entire time, there isn’t a single
hint to what the story is going to be.
All you learn is that he is "totes amazeballs" at his job and he is super
in love with his dead fiancee. It’s at
this 20 minute mark that the story kinda/sort/almost starts but the narration
of the film never, ever leaves. Breen
won’t show you what is happening but will just explain it to you…and even then,
what is happening makes no sense because all the narration wants to talk about
is the adoration he feels for his dead lover.
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| How to properly stand when you refuse to do a nude scene for your friend's shitty film. |
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| Whoa! This dude is clearly the master of stealth. That person will never notice the thick white powder you put on their arm! |
What’s truly ridiculous about
this story—and there’s a lot of ridiculous shit going on here (like how Breen
clearly thinks he is writing some truly deep musings about a Post-9/11
society)—but it’s truly a spectacle to watch how Breen thinks important details to the
main point of conflict (the supposed terrorist attack on Las Vegas) are okay to
leave out of the script but it's absolutely vital for the viewer to know that his character of lives
off tuna in a can (there’s even a whole scene watching him eat and spilling on
himself for some reason). Or there’s the
ridiculous part where Aaron Brand rubs a tourist with a biological agent that,
as he puts it, kills on contact but, literally a second later, informs us that
that man will be dead in about 5 minutes.
That’s not quite killing on contact, is it? I thought you were the best
spy/agent/terrorist/desert wander in the business?!? In all honesty, this film felt like Breen
rented some cameras, filmed a fuck-ton of B-roll out in the desert outside of
Vegas, got his hands on a lot (and I mean A LOT) of stock footage and edited
that stuff together and then used narration to try and make a story out of it
all. That’s the only thing I could come
up with because I can’t believe someone edited it together and said, “Yep, that
makes sense.”
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| The tuna was never mentioned if it was dolphin-free or not. That seems like a big detail to gloss over. It was important enough to tell us he eats it...and is probably the best eater of canned tuna in the world but was it dolphin-safe? |
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| And here's Breen's money shot. There's no doubt in my mind that he thought he just filmed the deepest, most momentous visual in all of cinema with this one. |
Double Down is just a truly
horrendous film that is more a monument to one man’s clearly uncontrollable ego
than it is even remotely a coherent story.
I could write about this one forever because there is so much bad going
on here—like how flubbed lines were left in the film or how Breen’s reaction of
his fiancee getting assassinated sounds more like a mild orgasm than a sound of
pain. Also there's how Brand can apparently hack anything with two satellite dishes, 3
flip phones and a couple of laptops that are clearly never turned on or the
whole thing with the Fool’s Gold or just the general bad acting or how there’s
no real characters in the film or who the antagonist and protagonists are—but
it is in this disastrous mess that makes the film somewhat entertaining to watch. Unlike other Awesomely Bad Movies like The
Room, Troll 2 and Birdemic, the fun factor of this film doesn’t come from the
bad acting and shitty dialogue (because, sadly, the majority of what’s said is
done by Breen and you barely see other characters in the story) but rather just
from the nightmare of a slop-pile this film is.
Ultimately, however, it makes the feature a double edged sword and it makes this insanely
hard to watch. It’s terrible and it’s a
great unintentional comedy but, unlike other films that are prime for a night
of pizza, booze and riffing the night away with your buddies on the couch, this
one is so hard to sit through that maybe it only warrants a one-time
viewing…but, at the very least, it is a funny one-time viewing.
