Montana

I almost didn't look at it over the low ratings I'm glad I ignored them and watched it. The movie is 8 or 9 star movie not a 5 star. It's a must watch it's one of them hidden gems.

This was on Tubi and looked worth a try- The movie starts out violently but with the main bad guy in shadow, then moves to a more current time and the same over-the-top violence occurring, but the bad guy is obvious.

There's a teen in the movie and it is expected that other teens will watch, but the levels and intensities of violence at the start is ruthless and unnecessary imo to establish that the bad guy is bad. He proved that when he wanted someone killed in his crew that was untrained and an easy mark. That's it- then the movie could have proceeded from there and worked great. The violence to Lars' character would have been better done in flashes of memory. Then teens could watch the rest of the film with various homage to Leon, John Wick, Karate Kid- and other favorites, i'm sure.

There are a couple big plot holes, esp the kid being trained so well, bad guys missing shots at nearly point-blank range, attempts at religion and emotional range- but the story is engrossing enough to help you get past all that.

Lars is stellar and made it look easy. For me, he came out of nowhere and reminds me of a young Lance Henriksen. I expect we'll see more of him in the future.

In the Revenge action movie sub-genre, "Montana" is a great protégé movie with compelling characters, a ton of growling (LOVE that! LOL), and great fight scenes.

I highly recommend it and hope you enjoy the morality. It's always good to see the bad guys get their comeuppance. There's a ton of cursing and some of the characters are major jerks. So satisfying when they get taken down. There is some time spent developing the back story on the characters so you care what happens to them.

The title is a nod to Scarface in case you the miss the reference. At first I thought it was set somewhere in Eastern Europe but it turns out to be London's East End. Bits of it reminded me of John Wick.

The story/plot is great, the script writing...not so great. Given what Lars Mickkelson had to work with in terms of his lines, he did a masterful job. I thought this was going to be a typical UK movie, but I was pleasantly surprised. The only thing typical of UK movies in this film were the gratuitous F-bombs, which I am not a fan of. I think it's just lazy script writing in my opinion. The action and choreography was well done. This movie is worth the watch, seeing an unlikely pair come together and establish a strong bond with each other, and somehow make it quite believable, which can be attributed to great acting.

Review: After being disappointed with a lot of movies in the genre from the UK, my expectations wasn't that high, but I really enjoyed this film.  The storyline is very well put together and there's enough material to keep the movie interesting, which means I actually stayed awake through the whole film. Basically it's about a young orphan who lives in a night club and runs drugs for a European kingpin called Lazarus, whose done some bad things earlier on in his life, which eventually catch up with him. After the kid gets the drug lords stash stolen from him, he ends up in the firing line but he gets saved by an old war veteran who was a victim of the drug lords dodgy past. It then turns into a bit of a Karate Kid movie because the veteran trains the young kid to take down the drug lord after finding out that he killed his father. Then it switches to an action movie with dodgy cops and big shootouts, which were professionally pit together. It's good to finally see a film in this genre, were the kids are respecting there elders and actually listening to there advice. I liked the chemistry between Demitrije and Montana and the director showed some depth to the characters which made the film seem realistic. Anyway, its refreshing to finally see a film in this genre which has a decent script and some decent characters, especially as it's based around the gangster world in the UK. Enjoyable!

Round-Up: I was surprised to see Michelle Fairley in this movie, who played Catelyn Stark in the Game Of Thrones, but she only has a few scenes. Adam Deacon plays a loud mouth, trigger happy, wannabe gangster who wants to take over the whole business by taking out his boss but his partner, played by Ashley Walters, thinks that the time isn't right because of the random killings that are happening to the other drug dealers in the area by a mysterious assassin who wears a murders his victims with a motorcycle helmet. This part of the story was a bit sketchy and unexplained, which is the only fault that I found with the movie. Apart from that, all of the actors put in good performances, especially by McKell David who played Montana, but I found the training scenes a bit corny. In all, it's definitely worth a watch because of its intensity and action scenes but it might get overlooked because it went straight to DVD and it didn't get the big budget  advertising treatment.

I recommend this movie to people who are into their UK gangster movies about a young boy whose on the run from drug dealers after there stash gets stolen from him. 6/10