Endgame

It is no wonder that Gary Wicks who wrote, cast and directed this effort has found his career limited to low key gay productions ever since. This film suggests a peculiar personal bent which has little relevance to the wider public whether gay or straight.

A rather cute rent boy is retained by a wealthy gangster to be exclusively available to him in a posh West End apartment. He uses the lad to service business clients or entrap business rivals or debtors. Sessions are filmed for subsequent blackmail use.

The gangster himself is turned on by violence and rape and we see the youth seriously abused on several occasions. Plainly there is little humanity in his treatment. Eventually a series of deaths occur as the plot evolves into a search to retrieve blackmail tapes hidden by our attractive young hero.

The camera work is both artistic and indulgent for admirers of boy beauty. Daniel Newman, a prolific 90's UK child star with elfin good looks and a well tuned physique, is filmed in every glamorous method. Soft lighting, superb make up, imaginative angles, explicit full frontal and frequent erotic posterior shots provide the viewer with a definitive 'soft porn' experience that has probably made the young actor into masturbatory fantasy image for millions of gay men ever since. But did Daniel Newman ever realize the motivation of Gary Wicks to produce this effect? The young man probably had to spend hours on set stark naked for the 'artistic' pleasure of his employers. And what we see in the finished film is probably just a censored fraction of the full unexpurgated footage taken during shooting. Gary Wicks went on to produce an intimate portrait of real life boy porn star Johann Paulik and, unless Dan Newman was entirely unmoved during the filmed sex scenes, I expect there is an archive of XXX material depicting him somewhere.

In short I got the distasteful impression that an innocent former child star was hoodwinked into appearing in a soft porn production that ultimately wrecked his career. He has done very little since, despite the fair reviews of his acting performance, and runs a fitness center in Wimbledon today for his living. Type cast as an effete boy prostitute with nothing of his body left for the public to imagine, there was very little future in the industry for him and he was just put on the sidelines.

This film portrays homosexuality as a sick violent disease, boy prostitutes as 'trash' figures without any sense of self esteem and women as the only qualified givers of worthy love - even though they betray their husbands to sleep with boy prostitute neighbors that happen to need their help. I give the actors top marks for this production - especially Dan Newman who probably suffered a lot for it - but the film itself is nothing more than soft porn masquerading as respectable drama.

This one's relatively typical, albeit decidedly less flashy and without some of the pretentious editing, of most modern British gangster pictures (THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, GANGSTER NO. 1, SEXY BEAST) in that it's overtly violent and foul-mouthed for those that like a dose of toughness now and then. This one's unique take is that it uses gangster shenanigans as the basis for a thriller revolving around homosexual, rough-trade sex and police corruption. The cast is first-rate; and in spite of a story that's relatively contrived and silly, it still entertains like an old Fritz Lang thriller, which is saying a lot for it and it's creator, Gary Wicks. Fairly smashing!

I could say the movie could have been more, but the basic idea was so rancid that no amount of tinkering would have made any real difference.

Tom (the pouty Daniel Newman) is a kept man (although they regularly emphasize to us that he is still too emotionally immature to be a man) who kills his gangster "daddy" to save himself from rape (the only time we see anything with two men in this film involves rape and violence). He then flees with a hapless American couple. He grows close to the American woman while corrupt cops and crooks are on his trail, complete with a grotesque scene at a gay bar where, if memory serves, they rape someone who works there. While the American man goes off about the car, Tom and the wife give into their attraction. This is juxtaposed with graphic torture and murder scenes involving the husband, a clumsy way to remind us of the horrors to come. And so they continue coming, finally leading up to another grisly, excessively violent set piece, with the conclusion being that Tom is back where he started, that without the love of a good woman, he has no hope. As the icing on the anti-gay cake, we also get a heavy implication of just what "caused" him to be gay.

There's a difference between showing the reality of a life of a rent boy, or even telling a story about how abuse and homosexuality sometimes intersect, and idealizing heterosexuality to such a strong degree - to the point where the woman in question is not even a character, but rather a thinly sketched out martyr and sexual savior.

Beyond the message itself, the mechanics of the film are crude and coarse. No amount of nice scenery or noir lighting are enough to compensate.

The one scene in the film that has a poignancy to it is the scene that the whole movie is about - Tom, essentially, finding healing and peace through his first sexual encounter with a woman. The shy vulnerability that defines him as he slowly strips (hesitating before he removes his underwear, as he knows he can't go back after that last step) contrasting to his pure joy and release as he kisses and tastes the upper body of the woman who is there to show him what his life is supposed to be, as he makes love to her, in the missionary position, as she exists as a missionary to what the film wants him to be.

They may have been better off just releasing this scene and ditching the rest.

This moody British film, not to be confused with Samuel Becket's work of the same name, was chosen to "disturb" the festival audience, or so said the talking heads of the programming panel. Rent boy Tom (Daniel Newman) gets caught in the evil machinations of his pimp, gangster George Norris (Mark McGann) and a crooked cop Dunston (John Benfield), who enjoys using Tom from time to time, himself. A fateful twist causes Norris's accidental death during his attempted rape of Tom. Desperate to escape Norris's body and Dunston's pursuit, Tom seeks the solace and protection of a very unlikely pair, his downstairs American neighbors Max and Nicki.

Max is a hothead consumed with a passion for money, while Nicki is more down to earth, but a bit unfocused and uncommitted herself. Why in the world would Tom come to them? Desperation, indeed. Walking totally of their initial characters (or perhaps showing us how complex they are?), Max and Nicki, after little hesitation, agree to hide Tom out at their rustic cottage in Wales. A very confused Tom is attracted to Nicki's warmth, and they eventually "seduce" each other. We can understand Nicki's dissatisfaction with Max's self-absorbed hard shell of a personality, and her momentary attraction to Tom's complete vulnerability. And despite how implausible it may seem at first, their sex scene makes sense once we realize that Tom is seeking tenderness, not hot sex per se.

All in all, this film hits home with its theme of sex as a tool of power which even the power-obsessed themselves can't control. But it falls short trying to wrap things up with a fast and violent ending which leads Tom to a happy future, and leads Nicki to sacrifice much more than her husband, Max, does.

I recently saw End Game at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. From the synopsis i was duped into thinking this would be a psycho sexual drama/thriller exploring the brutal relationship between a gangster and his rent boy lover.

What we actually have is a hammy, badly written, underdeveloped film which neither thrills, excites or convinces on any level. Which is a shame as the first ten to fifteen minutes of the film director/screenwriter Gary Wicks shows some signs of directorial flair. Unfortunately when he starts putting dialogue in his actors mouths and drenches the story in jaw dropping implausibility this soon becomes a painful experience.

Tom (Danny Newman) is a pouty rent boy living in stunning flat somewhere in West London which is financed by his gangster lover/pimp Norris (Mark McGann). Tom appears to do little else then sit around the flat chain smoking and looking moodily into space waiting for Norris to pop round, whiff a line of coke and start beating ten bells out of him.

Things get complicated, however, when Tom meets his neighbours American couple Max and Nikke Bergman(Corey Johnson & Toni Barry). For some inexplicable reason Max takes a shine to Tom and invites him round for dinner. Unfortunately for Tom his fist happy fella happens to pop round while he's out and menacingly waits for his return. Clearly we have some idea where this is heading....Tom accidentally kills Norris and turns to his new best buddies for help. Conveniently they have a cottage out in the middle of nowhere in Wales where they can all flee. This turns out, luckily, to be quite handy as corrupt policeman Dunston (John Benfield) is hunting Tom for some incriminating video tapes.

The eventual outcome of this scenario is so far fetched one can't help wonder what exactly Wicks was going for. By making his lead quite obviously queer it would have made much more sense for his character to form a relationship with Max however instead love blossoms between the gay boy and the American wife. This reeks of a cop out, as if Wicks knows there is no way a wider audience would stand for the idea of a straight man and a gay boy having a relationship that's based on anything other than money or violence.

In a failed attempt to add gravitas to Tom's plight we learn, from soft focused flashbacks, that all he really needs is some proper TLC which he clearly is unable to get from another man. By taking this stance Wicks renders his film completely absurd and manages to offend and alienate his target gay audience.

Performance wise there is no denying that the camera loves Danny Newman (especially his naked torso) however his acting consists of two styles.....moody and pouty...his final emotive speech is quite unintentionally mirth inducing.

Johnson is OK as Max and is perhaps the most likeable amongst a gang of completely unsympathetic characters while Barry is bland at best.

Production values are quite high on this film so at least everything looks nice and there are one or two touches of humour that work but that really is all the film has going for it. Thrown in some unnecessarily gratuitous violence and a denouement which is sign posted before the half way mark this really is a waste of time for all concerned. A massively wasted opportunity.

*