Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Drew Kirsch
Starring: Joe Cole, Rita Ora, Marshawn Lynch, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Paul Wesley, Josh
Holloway
He Bled Neon has a great title for a movie about a young man raised in
Las Vegas. And there is much neon on screen here. Making his narrative
feature debut, music video director Drew Kirsch shoots Sin City with the
same sort of fascination as Nicholas Winding Refn films the bright lights
of Los Angeles. As with much of Refn's output, there is style for days
here, but little substance behind the glitz.
It's the tired old plot of a character who left the criminal underworld
behind him to start a new life, only to find himself sucked back in. Joe
Cole plays Ethan, a a Vegas street kid who fled the city when his older
brother Darren's criminal ambitions starting getting a little too
dangerous. In the years since, Ethan has built a new life in Los Angeles
with a promising career in real estate and a glamorous fiancée. Just as
he's about to interview for a promotion, Ethan receives an anonymous text
message alerting him that Darren recently overdosed and his funeral is set
to take place that afternoon. Ethan drops everything and returns to the
city he once called home.
In Vegas, Ethan quickly begins to suspect that his brother's death wasn't
an overdose. Reuniting with his old crew - Luis (Ismael Cruz
Cordova), Prince (Marshawn Lynch) and Megan (Rita Ora), with whom he
was once romantically involved - Ethan hits the streets surrounding the
Strip in search of answers, leading him to a conspiracy involving the
unsolved murder of a prominent mobster as detailed in the opening
sequence.
The most interesting aspect of He Bled Neon is how it's essentially a
detective story, but here it's criminals who are doing the investigation.
Given their past and their illegal lifestyles, Ethan is unsure if Luis,
Prince and Megan can be trusted, suspecting that maybe one of them
betrayed his brother. It's a setup rich in gritty promise, but He Bled
Neon is less interested in character dynamics and more concerned with
superficially aping the post-Tarantino crime thrillers of the '90s, right
down to the tiresome cliché of introducing every character by splashing
their name across the screen in a frame-filling font, even those who
barely make a dent in the narrative.
The script is courtesy of Tim Cairo and Jake Gibson, two of the writers
on the recent vampire cop thriller Night Patrol, another movie which
squandered its promising premise. Here they fail to bring life to any of
their lowlife characters, and the talented cast similarly struggles to
make anyone stand out. Cole does an impressive job of evolving over the
course of a weekend from a suit-wearing real estate broker to the street
kid he once was, shedding a bad wig for a buzz cut and collecting various
bruises along the way, but there is nothing about Ethan that makes him a
protagonist worth following. Ora has a convincing badass swagger but
struggles with an accent that seems to cross the US/Mexican border several
times in a single sentence. The sexual tension between the two British stars is unconvincing to the point that we're taken aback when we learn that Megan and Ethan were once lovers. Josh Holloway makes for an intimidating
villain but is wasted in a role that barely amounts to more than a
cameo.
Kirsch can't quite nail the tone he's seeking to strike here. For the
most part it's a moody nocturnal thriller, but the over the top fight
scenes see He Bled Neon morph into the sort of cartoonish caper you might
expect from Guy Ritchie. The brawls are admittedly well mounted, but they
jar with the seriousness of the rest of the film and remind us all too
clearly that we're in the hands of a music video director here. He Bled
Neon ends up in a no man's land between geezer caper and gritty thriller,
and its schizophrenia is unlikely to satisfy fans of either type of crime
movie.
