Men with Guns (1998)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Eddie and Richard are two losers who were bullied as children. Adulthood is not much different. They opt to get guns and fight back and suddenly when things go awry they find themselves way over their heads leaving the audience with nothing to root for but a quick end to the film.I didn't like the plot, the characters, or the dialogue.Guide: F-bomb. Sex and nudity.

About the only kindest thing one can say for "Men with Guns" is that unlike most Canadian films, the movie does not try to disguise its location and characters as American - it's made clear it's taking place in Toronto and the surrounding area. Otherwise, the movie goes wrong in just about every way you can think of. The main problem is with the script. The heart of the story - two criminal lowlifes getting their hands on a large supply of illegal narcotics belonging to the mob - has been done on TV and in other movies many many times before. It still could have worked, but the script also suffers from characters that are not only extremely thin, but are pretty repulsive and one note. The cast shows some talent, but the only actor who manages to make an impression is American Paul Sorvino - and he is only given three (brief) scenes in the entire movie. The movie also suffers from shoddy production values; it looks like a low budget Canadian TV show from the 1980s instead of a movie. Obviously not to be confused with the reportedly superior John Sayles movie of the same title that came out around the same time.

In its favor, "Men With Guns" has a cool title, three strong performances, a nice sense of ambiance and atmosphere, Paul Sorvino doing what Paul Sorvino does, a few genuinely funny moments, a pretty good party/orgy scene, and a dandy chase scene that gives you a sense of the character's desperation and fright.On the other hand, you can go to a video store or turn on your cable provider, and see a hundred gritty crime dramas about small time losers getting in over their heads with the mob and/or the law, some of them much better paced and told than this one.While "Men With Guns" has a slightly different emphasis with its emphasis on the devotion and loyalty of the two friends to each other, the director seemed to out of his way to rub the audiences' collective noses in the sleaze and grime of their lowlife scene, to the point where it seemed to me he was wallowing in cinematic tricks and clichés stolen directly from Tony Scott and French existential cinema. Add to that a rushed ending that doesn't have the guts to live up to its "Butch Cassidy" finish and characters who are dense, unthinking, and pretty unsympathetic (it's not a tragedy if the bad things that happen to the protagonists is a direct result of their own stupidity) and you've got a movie that makes you wish you'd watched "GoodFellas" or "Taxi Driver".The director and cinematographer obviously have some chops - this is a well "made" movie with professional polish and some great setups. But they need to set their sites a little higher regarding the story they want to tell.If you just have to watch a gritty crime drama about low lives getting in over their heads with the mob and the cops, and you've already seen all the better movies in the genre 100 times, well, "Men With Guns" will give you your crime drama fix. But you'll probably prefer to go back and watch "Rounders" for the 101st time instead.

The basic plotline could apply to hundreds of movies: a couple of regular guys get mixed up in the world of drug dealers and guns, to their peril. There are only so many twists and turns a screenwriter or director can throw into such a story, so this isn't exactly the kind of film that will change the world. But the performances are excellent (especially Callum Keith Rennie, playing the sad, sweet, tragic mental case so well you can practically see the thoughts in his sleepy eyes), the script and art direction are just fine, and the overall level of suspense is perfect. The viewer will know his own tolerance for violence and profanity--there's quite a bit of both, but not so much that I found them distracting. Plenty of shots are fired, but no one is turned into bullet hamburger like you see in some movies. All in all, a good entry in the B-movie shoot-em-up crime genre, and especially watch out for CKR.