What ensues is a story that seesaws between exuberant nonsense and a sort of half-assed sociopolitical awareness, mixing resentment of amoral techno-fascist douchebros, fascination with their show-off houses, and a slightly pervy obsession with model-actress-whatever types who might not, factually speaking, be teetering on the edge of the age of legal consent, but are nevertheless made up and costumed to evoke a barely pubescent anime waif, or Lolita. Krug and Monaghan, I’m sorry to say, are terrible in this, though it’s hard to blame them entirely or even partially, given the lumpiness of the script and the director’s seeming incapability of steering into the skid and producing a glorious wreck of a movie, the kind audiences cheer lustily even though they know it’s dumb.
A lot of the issues come back to the question of whether you’re watching the kind of film that cares about believable psychology or one that could not care less. It handles the distress of Sky’s roommate more sensitively than one might expect, but it also has the hero getting his leg broken with a tire iron during an attempted car break-in and then gives us zero indication of how that shocking crime might’ve affected the victim’s psyche (for the most part, he acts as if it was an inconvenience).
Soon we realize we’ll never figure out who Sky “really is” because there’s nothing in her head but greed and evil. Kudos, kind of, for taking one more giant step into raw, uncut sleaze by bringing in character actor Frank Grillo (the film’s other memorable performance) to play a preening, wiseass, thug-mastermind type. Grillo’s smirky delivery, New York tough guy swagger, and retro-’50s pompadour read as an invocation of Mickey Rourke, the crown prince of screen debauchery in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the star of Michael Cimino’s remake of the home invasion thriller “The Desperate Hours,” which the final third of the film sometimes resembles (along with both versions of “Funny Games“).
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