The Quickie

After only a few minutes, I could measure the influence that THE GODFATHER had on this mobster family drama topic. It is not bad and rather unusual to show Russian mobster in the US without too many clichés. The director and male lead are Russians and that helps of course to make it believable. Jennifer Jason Leigh brings her share to this crime drama flick; maybe more drama than crime though.

"The Quickie" tells of a decadent Russian mob family who lives in Malibu and...well, frankly, this awful attempt at drama isn't worthy of commentary.

Jason Leigh introduces herself to Mr. Mob-guy as being from "Pacific Exterminators" with huge letters in plain sight on her back which say "West Coast Exterminators". Eventually the mob-guys get suspicious because she was exterminating in a bedroom. (duh).

In another scene Mr. Mobguy plays Russian roulette giving a hooker $4000 to bet whether he'll live or die. She has 5 chances out of 6 of keeping the money if she bets "live". Well, she bets "die". (double duh) Later she complains it wasn't fair and wants to play again. (Triple duh).

The list of flaws just goes on and on while this intelligence insulting film stinks and sinks in a quagmire of lousy music, mediocre camera work, poor direction, boring story, etc. Pass on this loser. (D)

Note - The barebones DVD which I rented had no English same language subtitles or closed captions.

This movie came very close to being a good flick. The direction needs to be a bit smoother to progress from one piece to the next to make it more plausible. In particular: The main character's need to escape is not explicit enough. Is he trying to kill himself? Is he trying to escape? His life does not seem to be that bad, so it makes it more difficult to swallow that he wants to leave his life so much. Also, it is not very clear how much "in love" he has fallen with Jennifer Jason L. If the movie was reworked with some more attention to these details, it would have been Great. On the other hand, for an indy flick, it's pretty good! Maybe if you have a couple of drinks, to dull the logical thinking, it would be more fun...

I wanted to see this movie because I liked "Kavkazskij Plennik" ("Prisoner of the Mountains") and "Brat" ("Brother") with Sergey Bodrov, Jr. and "Vor" ("The Thief") with Vladimir Mashkov. Well, unlike the other movies, "The Quickie" was a total waste of time. The story that makes little sense, very uneven acting (Lesley Ann Warren was especially bad), really awful dialogs, poor cinematography, what else could go wrong? I find it amusing that in practically every American-made movie, when the same-language-speaking foreigners (Russians in this case) are left alone, they prefer to communicate with each other mostly in broken English (and when they happen to speak Russian, for some reason translators feel obligated to add a lot of "f**ks" in the sentences, which have no profanity, literal or non-literal). At the same time, native-English-speaking actors choose to speak in broken Russian. Why is that? Getting back to the story, most of the subplots of the movie (e.g. betting the house, inviting Latin American paramilitaries, etc) either make no sense or do nothing more than confusing the viewers. It is too bad that Bodrov, Mashkov, and Leigh (all good actors in my humble opinion) got themselves involved in this disaster.

I saw this movie on the movie channel and unfortunately missed the first few minutes of the film but found the rest of it intriguing. None of it made any sense, of course but I found myself unable to turn it off. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality to me. What the heck was the bug lady doing in this film, anyway? Was the lead guy a mob boss or a tap dancer turned to crime in order to make a living?

In spite of the shortcomings, I really liked the soundtrack. Especially haunting were the songs by the Tiger Lillies.

My advice is to forget the movie and buy the soundtrack (if you can find it anywhere - which I have not been able to do).