No One Lives (2012)
Everyone runs. Everyone Hides.
I spent most of my day in a car shop getting my car worked on - at the point of writing this review, that’s roughly 59 percent of my waking hours in fact - so to say coming into tonight’s movie I was exhausted would be an understatement to be honest. I pulled out a list of a six or so movies that sounded like they could be good and forced my cousin to pick one, and tonight’s movie is the result. To be sure, tonight was found to be a very good practice of don’t judge a book by it’s cover - or a movie by it’s description block. Tonight you should really strap, as the WWE movie division brings us that one guy people will recognize from that one Fast and Furious movie in an absolute bloodbath very aptly titled No One Lives.
So I’m going to be honest - upfront this sounded like it was going to be much more of an action flick. “When kidnappers kidnap the wrong dude, he ends up turning the tables on them” instills in me visions of someone kidnapping some military guy who then systematically breaks people in half while shouting goofy one liners. What we actually got was a horror movie that I’m pretty sure actually has no good guys at all. Much like a Warhammer 40k setting, everyone is the bad guy, just pick your flavor of which bad you’d like to root for. We start off seeing some girl running through a booby trapped woods only to get caught at the last minute. Then we get introduced to a couple whose relationship looks really pretty crap, and then a band of criminals with the loose cannon one pretty well constantly screwing everything up. The paths intersect when after spotting them in a bar and in an attempt to flip around the crew misfortunes that he brought about the loose cannon kidnaps the couple later to turn around their misfortunes. Turns out, he’s actually just made it far worse than any of them can know.
The actors have a wide range of effectiveness. While I wouldn’t say that anything feels like a totally phoned in job, there’s certainly times or characters that don’t really get to shine as much as perhaps they could. It’s also a WWE brand movie, so in comparing it to all the other movies of that type that I’ve seen over the years I don’t go in expecting to see everyone deliver award winning or nominated performances. Still, at times it can be a bit cheesy or schlocky - fine by me, I love that stuff - or limited by the character. Our big bruiser type crime guy? Yeah, that’s all hes got to work with. Maybe gets out twenty word the entire movie, and mostly they are all just threats. The newbie kid whose almost always in a state of panic or loosing his lunch over violence? At times adorable sure, at other times perhaps hamming it up a slight bit. For the most part, everyone does a well enough job that you can’t really blame them when something feels a little emotionless or bland though, so I’m going to call it good enough.
The larger problem then even the lowest point of acting is totally the characters. Like I kind of said before, I don’t think this movie actually has any heroes to root for by the time it gets going proper (which really isn’t very long into it). Our lead ends up being an absolute horrible psychopath, and the the criminal crew are all a bunch of crooks anyways. Perhaps we are meant to root for the crooks, but the only real rooting you do towards that end is hoping the more violent member of the crew gets his comeuppance for constantly being an absolute numbnut. Perhaps the newbie and the daughter (who isn’t involved in the crime stuff as far as the movie goes), or the surprise edition are folks we are supposed to be rooting for - but it is a messy batch of characters for sure. All I know is that the main quickly turns into the most R rated thing I’ve seen in a WWE movie, and makes quite a lot of work for the effects department. Don’t really expect any character development here - you’d be better off laying down bets on how long people last.
Crime Crew
Effects department gets to have some work done in this one. Violence is off the chains - including but not limited to wood chippers and literal meat suits. I can’t even say that it’s not graphic this time around - I mean, again, literal meat suit. Yeah, there’s an explosion or two, and some blood - but for the body count on this thing holy smokes. In fairness, not all are equally done - both in the amount of effects used amping up the violence and just the severity of the kill either. If you enjoy slasher movies, this one will probably fit well in your collection in that way - and oddly enough most of them still don’t feel as undeserved or ridiculous as what you get in the average Saw movie. Costumes are relatively normal modern affair, so there isn’t much to say there outside of they work well at being convincing. There’s also a few scenes that lack costumes or clothes in general, so whether you’d like to see a few of the actress probably hard-earned bodies or that fine Luke Evans booty this movie has got you.
Audio was there. Typical me, music wise it’s entirely vanished by the end of the movie outside of the final scenes song, which made for some really uncomfortable conflicting feelings as though the happy ending is the title of the movie, but it really doesn’t feel as happy as the music makes it feel it wants you to believe. Line deliveries all come across fine, and for the most part the acting behind them does a decent job with emotions and the likes. Some will feel a bit meh, but you’ll have no problem hearing it regardless. Other effects are punchy or squishy or otherwise as you’d expect, so no real complaints for me to lodge towards the audio department. Subtitles provide some fun moments, like “burly guy” or just extra emphasis to some of the funnier lines someone says - like responding to be asked why the killer is doing this resulting in “it keeps me fit.” Admittedly, it probably takes a twisted sort of humor to find them funny, and it might be telling that I found them funny - but you can’t help what you laugh at I say.
I’d like to say there’s some good commentary in here, but to be totally honest I was more waylaid by the tonal change of what I thought the movie was compared to what it actually was. In turn, I’m going to have to just kinda fluff this section a little bit - because with enough thinking any movie can turn into a commentary on something right? In this case, we could make it about not judging books by their covers, because there’s always secrets worming underneath. We could also talk about how things aren’t always black and white, since this things is mostly shades of evil going on. There’s also probably some stuff about stockholm syndrome, and crimes not paying. It’s pretty loaded all considering, but I also don’t know if i would say that all of that is necessarily intentional behind the scenes.
Table Turner
The movie isn’t bad, but man should you probably know what you are getting into before hopping on in. It’s a rather bleak and gritty violent slasher movie where the hero is the slasher. It might not be the most eloquent movie, but I’m pretty sure it delivered exactly what it set out to do. You’ll get some conflicts of morals and thoughts if you try to think to hard and attach to the movie, but if you enjoy dealing in shades of darkness or getting some grisly body counts on screen, this thing will probably be right up your alley - hopefully not armed! I’ve seen far worse in many regards, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this was a far throw from the The Marine I had originally thought it was going to turn out to be.