By Ben Hooper.
Don’t sell your soul for rock’n’roll.
Two boneheads get into some bad dudes for a lot of money to fund their terrible soft-rock band. Their solution? Jack a photoshoot out in the desert and make off with the jewellery. Obviously, they balls it right up, and it ends bloody.
Like its protagonists’ lives, The Shoot is a proper mess; half criminally unfunny action caper, and half mumblecore drama. What’s most frustrating is that when the writer-director team stop pissing around with ‘comedy’ parodies and pseudo-Tarantinoisms, they’re able to display some real potential, and dare I say it, elegance.
The desert landscapes are beautifully framed, with dusty long-shots and ethereal dissolves providing the detached feel of an indie drama. But conversely, close-ups are clunky and amateurish. The acting is poor across the board, although none of the actors have been given much of a character to get into.
There is a half-decent film in here somewhere, and hopefully with some experience the filmmakers can mine their potential and maybe follow in the wake of Adam Wingard and the Soska Sisters (watch Dead Hooker in a Trunk and then American Mary to see the kind of career trajectory I’m referring to), and as the movie’s main character croons, ‘Turn the maggots into flies.’
