The Number One Girl

Amateurish at best but boring at worst, "The Number One Girl" gives even pedestrian R-rated potboilers a bad name. Resist the urge to watch this direct-to-video tripe about a green-eyed gangster, a gorgeous gal, and cretinous action hero. Okay, I realize that Vinnie Jones of "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" endows this movie with some marginal marquee value, and I bought this DVD at a Movie Gallery clearance sale based on Jones and the "Karate Kid" star Pat Morita. The DVD box cover with a sartorially suited Jones holding two automatic pistols in a signature John Woo stance also lured me into shelling out my shekels this execrable epic. Moreover, clocking in at 85 minutes, I thought it would be a blast. Wrong on all counts! "The Number One Girl" makes "The Condemned" look like Oscar winning material. The star—real-life martial arts competitor Tony Schiena of "Wake of Death"—makes Casper Van Dien look like Sir Laurence Olivier. Mind you, Lisa McAllister is a babe, but she is not enough to make this melodramatic muck memorable. Production Manager turned director; Luc Campeau makes a pathetic directorial debut. Granted, "The Defender" scenarist Douglas W. Miller had a modicum of a good idea, but Campeau does nothing invigorating with it. The first big action scene in the beginning has no voltage—even though it's a movie-within-a-movie—and later scenes, particularly the multiple fights in the last quarter-hour are comatose. Incidentally, in the foreshadowing department, one of the characters uses the familiar "Star Wars'" line: 'I got a bad feeling about this." Gee, were they right! Vinnie, making crap like this is going to ruin your credibility. In fact, the less said about this forgettable film, the better. Peruse the other reviews for more details about this drivel, but don't rent, buy, or watch this wretched rubbish. Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!

Just turned up in Melbourne, Australia in December 2007. Never a good sign! Not only straight to video, but late to video.

I've seen Vinnie Jones drag other crappy movies from total crap to watchable crap (say Condemned or Slipstream). A true scenery chewer, one of the best.

But even Jebus himself couldn't have saved this woeful turkey. Started bad, got worse and surprisingly even worse.

I can tolerate the bad acting, the bad script and bad music but the direction was truly pedestrian.

Avoid at all cost, I want by 2 dollars and 2 hours back!

You can see the appeal when pitched - gangster and Hollywood star fight over beauty pageant favourite - but the execution from dialogue to staging is so horrible as to miss out on any possible positive result. The poor acting of the leads is only emphasised by assigning them long, rambling voiceovers in addition to dialogue, and the approach to the beauty pageant is incredibly 1970's and misogynistic, like a 12-year-old's staging of the whole idea.

Hidden somewhere is a worthy plot about international exploitation - something like "Traffic" - but it's incredibly well concealed. Meanwhile everything looks exactly like the budget available - the beauty pageant is in a London theatre but a really small one, the gangster's supposedly plush house is errrrr... kinda OK but not really spectacular. The music is adequate but doesn't really sound like it was composed for this movie, which must be some kind of problem...

It all feels bizarrely as if no-one involved with the entire process actually had English as their native language, which is ... really weird. The oddest thing is that it doesn't LOOK like one of those Z-list, shot on video, indie exploitation movies you find in Pound shops (though that's where I found it), it's just really, really badly done.

.... does a movie so bad, so wooden, so awful, and so painful get made. How this movie was ever green-lighted is beyond me. I can't believe Vinnie Jones agreed to be in this abomination. The acting was worse then that of soft-core porn thespians seen on Cinemax at 4 am. The script must have been written by a retarded monkey, with a typewriter. The director might as well have been Helen Keller. And the soundtrack was some of the worst music I have ever heard in my life. I bet that is the elevator music that plays in hell.

If you haven't figured it out by now..... I hated this movie with all my heart and soul. If I could go back in a time machine and either stop Hitler's reign, or this movie from being made, it would be a difficult choice.

I saw the cover for this, and being the sucker that I am, fell for it. Is there really anything cooler than a guy with two pistols and explosions? The acting is terrible, I mean TERRIBLE! I'll be glad if I never see Tony Schiena (he was in Jean-Claude Van Damme's Wake of Death, which was very good) or Luc Campeau make another movie. Script, are you kidding me? There is a relentless skirt-chasing A-list movie star,huge British mobster, and a bunch of bimbos out to make a buck; none of it even comes close to adding up. I had to watch the lip syncing scene three times, I can not believe this blatant lip syncing made it through (there is back-up singers on the audio track....) This is not a low budget Chuck Norris/ Jean-Claude movie with tons of action. Even the scene transitions sucked, I've seen better blackouts on Lifetime.