Give 'em Hell, Malone (2009)

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This Type of Retro-Neo-Noir has been done before and a whole lot Better. But it is a Comic-Book-Style that is still Refreshing but hard to pull off Completely. A Flawed Film that went Straight to Video but is better than Most in that Category. What you need in this Type of Thing is Style and Wit. This one has plenty of the Former and None of the Latter.Looking Great in a Digital Way, the Colors are Impressive and the Crisp Modern Sharpness fits in with the Emphasis on Looking Cool and for the Most Part it Succeeds. Thomas Jane makes for an OK Street-Worn Protagonist Culled from Pulp Sensibilities and gives a Believable, somewhat Straight Performance as the Narrator of this Wild and Crazy Story.Here's the Thing. What keeps this from becoming a Better Entry in this Sub-Genre of a Sub-Genre, is the Dialog and Perhaps the Clunky Characters. Although they are Acceptable Enough, its the Speaking Script, the Aforementioned Wit, that is Surely Lacking. There are Very Few Memorable Cynical Lines.Overall this is Entertaining Stuff with Enough High-Style to make it a Good Diversion. It Resides in that Other Dimension where it is Still a Fun Place to Visit and has not been Done to Death, Yet. By the way, the Best, for those who are New to this type, are Sin City (2005) and Dick Tracy (1990).

The only reason I watched this was because the guy at the video store handed it to me and told me it was really good, and I would've looked like a wuss if I had thrown it back at him & rented "Sense and Sensibility" instead. I mean, it's tough enough renting a Hugh Grant flick without the added pressure.So I got back home feeling a bit conned & not expecting much. Boy was I surprised. From the first 30 seconds I could tell this was no ordinary action flick.Yes, as other reviewers have noted, this film is strongly rooted in film noir. But what makes it so interesting is that it's noir without the noir. Sure, we have the lantern-jawed, emotionless anti-hero who's everything we would expect from Bogie. We have the mysterious femme fatale and the late night saxophone music to add to the mood. But the visuals, pacing and presentation is something very fresh, very vibrant & colourful, and so over-the-top violent that you can't help but feel the strong contrast against the typical 40s film noir. This was deliberate on the part of the director, just like he deliberately throws in lots of playful anachronisms: 1940s cars driving alongside modern minivans, and old time cityscape that suddenly blends into modern streets (from what I understand, that's what the city of Spokane is really like), and the list goes on. Other interesting contrasts include the tough-as-nails hero who's loving mother drops in at unexpected times. The flow of this film is anything but predictable, and that's what really keeps you hooked.But my favourite part was the insane lineup of villains. It's so surreal, like something out of Dick Tracy. I particularly liked the character of "Matchstick", a deformed, psychotic sicko whom you gotta fall in love with. Then there's the cute/slutty lolita girl "Mauler" who can carve a man up faster than a ginsu knife commercial; yet she complains that she can't get a date. And lastly we have the incomparable Ving Rhames playing the cold-hearted assassin who slips into Gandhi-like moments of introspection and wisdom. What a wacky bunch! This is definitely a fun film. Even the excessive violence is so exaggerated you gotta love it. Here we have the best gore clichés in the business: the guy who gets hit in the mouth and spits a gallon of blood, the guy who gets knifed in the leg and gushes blood like a hose, and don't forget the best one... someone getting their heart ripped out of their chest while they're still breathing. There's a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun going here. It's almost like an action flick that makes fun of action flicks. But at the same time it's subtle enough that you can take it as a straightforward action flick. Either way, you're in for a wild ride.

I looked up the word "incongruous" on one of those online dictionaries and all I found was an embedded video of Give 'em Hell, Malone playing on an endless loop. This thing has quite a few relatively clever elements but nothing whatsoever to tie them all together, producing a film that makes it about half way through on the strength of those elements and then implodes. The last half of this movie is almost amazingly terrible and you can practically see the filmmakers shrugging their shoulders as ever more stupid, illogical and arbitrary nonsense spills out onto the audience.Malone (Thomas Jane) is a hard man with a big gun making his Raymond Chandleresque way through the urban jungle. He's given a job of picking up a briefcase and finds himself the target of a slew of thugs, who he dispatches with brutal alacrity. Inside the case, Malone finds a toy elephant he calls "the meaning of love". Teaming up with the woman in red who hired him (Elsa Pataky), Malone finds himself on the run from a trio of noirish supervillains hired by crime boss Whitmore (Greg Harrison) to retrieve the case. Battling the vicious Mauler (Chris Yen), brooding Boulder (Ving Rhames) and insane Matchstick (Doug Hutchinson) in turn, with occasional stops at the nursing home so his mother (Eileen Ryan) can sew up his wounds, Malone bulldozes his way to an ending that frantically reaches for the heights of The Usual Suspects but falls to the depths of a self-referential circle jerk.Give 'em Hell, Malone appears to be the result of somebody who saw Sin City and walked away very impressed but with no understanding of how that sort of "cartoon noir" storytelling works. The result is a standard action flick with a bunch of anachronistic quirks which never have any point. For example, the characters of Malone, Boulder and Evelyn (Elsa Pataky) are straight out the 1940s in speech pattern and behavior. On the other hand, Whitmore and Malone's mother are totally modern in their words and affect. Doug Hutchinson is baldly doing an imitation of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. A guy gets set on fire and it only makes his flesh more smooth and moist. Mauler is established as a super-Ninja ass kicker only to have Malone defeat her while remaining tied up in a chair. We're shown numerous different scenarios of how Malone's family was killed and they're simultaneously played for humor and drama. A bad guy changes to a good guy with a one sentence explanation out of nowhere.The opening gun fight is extremely well done and the "cartoon noir" stylings of the film are amusing at first, but Give 'em Hell, Malone quickly falls into making too many obvious and easy jokes at the very noirish conventions it embraces. The humor in "cartoon noir" comes from how absurdly seriously it takes those conventions. When characters essentially start winking at the audience to let them in on the joke, all that's left is a lot of forced artificiality.The turning point for this movie is when Malone forces a motel clerk to admit that he's part of the scheme against him…and Malone then rents a room in the motel and stays the night. Does that make any sense? Why would you stay at a place being managed by someone who could call the bad guys and let them know where you are? The clerk never does that, which only compounds how ludicrous it is, and from that moment on these filmmakers no longer cared about any sort of internal logic or consistency in their story.Give 'em Hell, Malone is neither fish nor fowl. It never figures out why it does the things it does and gets smothered by that incomprehension. The first half isn't an utter disaster, but I can't imagine anyone sticking around 'til the end and feeling satisfied with how it turns out

It plays like a noir, it looks like a noir and it feels like a film noir ... So it must be a film noir! And it is. A pretty violent and bloody one, but still. There is everything here, that the formula would need. Except it does seem to play in another universe. Because you can't define it what time period in "our" world this is supposed to be. You have old cars and "old" clothing, but you also have cell phones and other newer inventions.But if you get hung up on the time period thing or get bothered by the fact, that this couldn't be played out in the "real" world and therefor is not a "pure" noir movie, than you would miss on the entertaining part of the movie. Thomas Jane, who seems the go to guy, if you need a "B-movie" action Hero (Punisher, Mutant Chronicles), but also has the weight of knowing what he is doing as an actor. A very fine choice for the lead role. "The Damsel in Distress" and other characters fill in quite nicely.After a very powerful beginning (an action scene, that gives you enough entertainment already), the thriller aspect of the movie kicks in. Nicely played (out) and beautifully shot and edited!