One in the Gun (2010)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Choosing to delve into Redbox Instant, in part due to the free trial, I picked this to watch first as it was the first one alphabetically that wasn't on Netflix already. That and I admire Robert Davi. So throwing caution to the wind (my previous experiences with the films of Rolfe Kanefsky have been less than stellar to put it diplomatically, read my review of "Pretty Cool" for more on that), I decided to give it a go, the results may surprise you... Or not.In a technical aspect, this film is atrocious, the sound is out of sync, which got annoying and at times felt like I was watching a badly-dubbed foreign film. The acting was very melodramatic, but after a while I was surprised to find that the film was growing on me like some utterly bizarre type of fungus. Well to a point at least, there's a shift of tone at some point that the film takes a nosedive after. But be that as it may, suffice it to say I did ultimately enjoy it much more than the aforementioned dismal Pretty Cool films and more than his more well-known and slicker but utterly forgettable Nightmare Man.

I hate reading the cover blurb on a movie that makes it sound like an action/adventure and then I have to sit through something like this.They're supposed to use code-words like 'psychological thriller', so you know whether you really want to rent the movie, let alone watch it.I guess you could compare it to other movies with off-the-wall twists if you really had to, but I think that would be doing those other movies a disservice.The acting and story can be quite melodramatic and over the top at many points (if intended) so, if you were expecting this sort of movie, you would probably be a bit more forgiving. But the movie continually goes from weird to weirder and was not what I was looking for.If you've seen other, similar movies (John Cusack , Identity) then you've already seen a decent movie and there's really no need to rehash a good concept with bad acting and bad writing.If you watched the movie and liked it, fine. But it's really not what you would expect from the DVD slip cover.

(1.) Cheesy acting and script. The dialogue sounded like it came from a high school drama class project. Quality acting credits? As is typical in these movies it is nearly invisible. Lots of TV videos, shorts or such movie classics as "She Alien", "Savage Island", "Return of the Killer Shrews", "Pimp Bulies", "Swamp Shark". (2.) Creating a lot of confusing, is it a dream or is it real, subplots only works with a quality script, plot and acting otherwise it's just arrogant look at clever me, "I can confuse you." writing and directing. (3.) Storyline: Some homeless guy bumps his shopping cart into some wealthy chick's shopping cart in the middle of a mostly empty parking lot. "Whoops, sorry, I didn't see you. How clumsy of me." Within the next 10 minutes he's recruited to come live with her and her husband and, oh, also kill him. But she doesn't know that the husband hired him as a cheap private eye to check on her. To make this a love quadrangle, is another boyfriend, who has been recruited by the wife to steal her husband's prized painting and sell it to some accent laden crook in a warehouse for 5 million - sure! Private eye shoots all the people involved in the painting heist, steals the money, and for some bizarre reason decides to just put one bullet into the gun afterwards, then spins the chamber and walks around in broad daylight and the rest of the movie like it's fully loaded. Does not make sense storytelling, does not equate with good storytelling. The final result is, quite implausibly, the wife lives and private eye dies. Anybody else that appeared in the movie is just forgotten about.

Going to the Los Angeles Premere of this film I found that the movie itself was very well done. Great use of camera angles, well acted, and to storyline grasped you into caring about it characters. Although, the first 20 or so minutes of the movie are a bit slow moving and you don't really get to know the characters very well you still are captivated by what is yet to come.By mid movie we, as an audience, are becoming more and more involved in the plot line where it will take us. The characters have become fully developed and we want to know more about what exactly is happening.As the end of the movie nears we find various different characters have some type of link to the main male character's past. Further blurring what is real and what is not.By the end we find that the character is doing soul searching while he is dying in the back of a car and feels guilty for the lives he helped to destroy. In his own mind he is trying to let these sins go before he dies and is willing to "burn in hell" for what he has done. What a great independent film!