Review of Love and a .45

Introduction

A “heist gone wrong” story when the genre was in its full swing in the early 90s. Watty - Gil Bellows (The Shawshank Redemption, Ally McBeal) and Starlene - Renee Zellweger (Jerry McGuire) are two white trailer-trash lovers. Watty’s regular job is holding up convenience stores with an unarmed pistol… that way nobody gets hurt. However he commits one job with loose cannon Billy Mack – Rory Cochrane, a no good low life and the obvious catalyst for Watty and Starlene’s life to tumble into free fall. Obviously, a heist goes wrong and events afterwards lead our lovers to go on the run, trying to avoid the police and other characters from stopping their break for freedom.

Initially this film starts off well. The leads are very likeable and have a good chemistry together. The slapstick nature of the story soon gets tiring though with the director/writer (C.M. Talkington) trying to tell a Bonnie and Clyde story in the best Tarantino way, with the directorial style of Oliver Stones’ Natural Born Killers. He fails both Tarantino and Stone miserably, without having the artistry or panache of these two to pull off. The story quickly descends into violent-yet-slapstick escapades with foul language in spades, so by the time the ending has come round you really don’t care if these people escape or not. Clocking in at just over an hour and a half, this seems like a long film indeed which really says nothing for the film.

Video

The picture is a cropped 4:3 image with some evidence of pan and scan. The image is clean and clear of artefacts and looks like a film made within the last decade. Whereas Tarantino would use the darkest of blacks and deep blood reds, and Stone use different filming techniques to highlight the density and gravity of violence being shot, Talkington uses neither, just relying on normal film stock to portray any gruesome actions here. This really doesn’t make this world exciting to the viewer, but instead camps it into normal American society. Perhaps that is what he was trying to create. However, the prints fine, shadow details are OK, but why didn’t VCI try to source a widescreen print?

Audio

VCI may not have come up short on the sound department though. After looking through the credits I notice that the film has been recorded in Dolby SR, the cinema precursor to Dolby Digital, and this is quite a good presentation considering the pro-logic offering. Nothing mind blowing by the way – an episode of the X-Files would show this a clean pair of heels any day. However dialogue is well placed, the music shows good separation through the front 3 channels, and the odd, occasional explosion does rattle through all speakers quite nicely – waking my subwoofer up at one point!

Features

Nowt but a trailer here.

Conclusion

Well its not one I’d recommend to you. Try before you buy definitely. Bellows and Zellweger show promise here, and obviously they have both now gone onto bigger and better things. Strangely enough I haven’t heard of the director Talkington any more! Again this film doesn’t really make good use of the DVD format with a 4:3 print and stereo sound. I can see why VCI didn’t want to go to the expense of sourcing a widescreen print and a stereo soundtrack, because I can’t imagine this to be a big seller… which leads me to the question why did they bother at all?