There's nothing like a good bit of girl on girl kung-fu action. By equal
turns sexy and brutal, without being erotic. It's a good thing Richard
Jobson knows this, by creating Scotland's first genuinely entertaining
chopsocky feature. Drawing on a skilled local crew, The Purifiers stands
as a slick and cartoony pseudo remake of The Warriors, with a little of
Bruce Lee's Game Of Death in structure.
An unnamed futuristic dystopian city (Glasgow's Science Museum by any
other name) has been divided into zones of control, each with their
gangs running off problems and miscreants. The Purifiers is the name
given to a gang of Tae-Kwon-Do experts who act as vigilantes, combatting
crime. Each city zone is connected by an infrastructure and one
faction wants to assume power by uniting the gangs into a single force. The
leader of this faction is called Moses (overplayed by Kevin McKidd - chillingly
minimalist in Jobson's debut 16 Years Of Alcohol), who
declares war on The Purifiers, when they reject his gleefully fascist
overtones. And so, gang war erupts, blood is spilled and trust destroyed.
The design of the film is straightforward and yet cleverly
skewed. Jobson's director of photography, John Rhodes, knows how to
shoot for storytelling and action in the same breath. His visual schemes
remind me of early Tak Fujimoto, with striking colour choices - electric
blue, film blown and digitally bleached out for moments set in the
past - memorable shots and unsubtle, but clever, cinematographic tricks.
The sound mixing is as delicate as a brick and that's both good and
bad. The film has unmemorable guitar and rock music as backdrop for
action. And buildup of bass and sudden silence is way overused for
dramatic purposes, diluting it's impact. While, on the other hand, comic
overuse of swishes and cracks for violent fighting works well in terms
of parody and playfulness.
If I'm going to poke holes in the film, then it's by equal turns
overwritten and underwritten. Jobson's script opens and closes with an
oh-so-serious soliloquy, read against a montage of the moon, along with a
CGI whizz-bang ride across the planets. It describes it as a bullet,
beautiful and violent. I read it as a metaphor for the inevitability of
gang war, as unvarying as the orbits of the planets. Pretty loose, don't
you think?
The Purifiers themselves are an undistinguished lot, with little to
separate them, aside from Gordon Alexander, the hero of the piece (and
fight choreographer) and Dominic Monaghan, who's only memorable since
he's a traitorous git, amid mild murmers of "What's a Hobbit doing
here?". The characters have been underwritten to a near cypherous
degree, and underplayed. What they are good at, however, is kicking
some ass.
Is that enough? In this case, sure. However, I'm waiting for
Jobson to break free from his low-budget rut and show me something
truly memorable.
Review by Scottie
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