Black and Mild: Toonen’s High Octane Adaptation a Bit Derivative
If you could imagine The Hangover remade as a drug fueled action thriller with stylizations that mimic rather than pay homage to early Guy Ritchie flicks, then you’d have something like Aren Toonen’s sophomore film, Black Out on your hands. While it’s slickly paced, this Dutch adaptation of a Swedish novel by Gerben Hellinga may satisfy pulp hounds that prize quick cuts and torrential tangents of backstory and flashback to insistently command their wandering attention, but there’s not much by way of innovation. Sexy babes with tough attitudes and nonsensical outfits stretch the limits of its tenuous believability, but its hyperkinetic design reveals the film to be a simple sugar, a quick burn whose buzz wears off well before the end credits.
Waking up next to a bloodied corpse in his bed, Jos Vreeswijk (Raymond Thiry...
If you could imagine The Hangover remade as a drug fueled action thriller with stylizations that mimic rather than pay homage to early Guy Ritchie flicks, then you’d have something like Aren Toonen’s sophomore film, Black Out on your hands. While it’s slickly paced, this Dutch adaptation of a Swedish novel by Gerben Hellinga may satisfy pulp hounds that prize quick cuts and torrential tangents of backstory and flashback to insistently command their wandering attention, but there’s not much by way of innovation. Sexy babes with tough attitudes and nonsensical outfits stretch the limits of its tenuous believability, but its hyperkinetic design reveals the film to be a simple sugar, a quick burn whose buzz wears off well before the end credits.
Waking up next to a bloodied corpse in his bed, Jos Vreeswijk (Raymond Thiry...
- 2/19/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Films centering around a protagonist attempting to fill in the blanks of his/her past run the gamut from The Hangover to Memento, and in my opinion have been quite overdone. However, Dutch fillmmaker Aren Toonen delivers a fresh take with his comedic crime drama, Black Out. Toonen effectively weaves wickedly funny humor into a crime thriller that keeps viewers engaged.
Jos Vreeswijk (Raymond Thiry) wakes up with more than a hangover, as he finds a dead body in his bed the day before his wedding. Despite the realization that he has no memory of the last two to three days, Jos assesses and addresses his situation very quickly, as he is no stranger to dealing with a crime scene. Through the use of voiceover narration by Jos, we learn that 10 years ago he was a shakedown henchman for drug dealers, but he gave up a life of crime and...
Jos Vreeswijk (Raymond Thiry) wakes up with more than a hangover, as he finds a dead body in his bed the day before his wedding. Despite the realization that he has no memory of the last two to three days, Jos assesses and addresses his situation very quickly, as he is no stranger to dealing with a crime scene. Through the use of voiceover narration by Jos, we learn that 10 years ago he was a shakedown henchman for drug dealers, but he gave up a life of crime and...
- 9/24/2012
- by Debbie Cerda
- Slackerwood
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