Michael Pare

  • Mayday (2019)

    Mayday (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) It takes maybe thirty seconds to understand that Mayday is a cheap, cheap film made on a tiny budget with subpar talent. There’s something immediately off-putting in the static camera movements, indifferent acting, tasteless writing and substandard production values. The only thing that helps is the mystery, once it gets started almost fifteen minutes in. We’re in a plane going from Los Angeles to London, and suddenly passengers vanish into thin air. What could possibly be the cause of this is the question that preoccupies our protagonist, an air marshal rather decently played by Michael Pare. If you’re intrigued, good, because that’s pretty much all that Mayday has going for it, especially as it develops its plot into something increasingly unsatisfying. Helped by a mysterious brunette who never seems to lose her cool (perhaps because she’s not a good actress, perhaps because of Botox), our protagonist discovers a mysterious magic tome. (It’s in old languages, but air marshal training apparently prepared him to read it.)  Then the plot leaps off the deep end in presenting an out-of-control demon taking people away (where?) for… reasons. The internal mythology presented in the film isn’t even consistent on at least two levels, and a dismayingly down-to-earth ending makes a mockery of whatever came before it. But don’t worry, because Mayday sabotages itself well before the underwhelming ending and its unconvincing CGI: it’s badly plotted, dumbly conceived and ineptly executed. The dialogue is terrible, the characters don’t have consistent motivations and it’s so badly handled that any working hypothesis viewers may have regarding what’s going on is guaranteed to be better than what actually happens later in the film. I still can’t quite square the purpose of it all, or the role played by the brunette character. There are tons of missed opportunities left on the table, and it’s a good thing that Pare is an old hand at saving bargain-bin movies like these because he’s often the least objectionable thing on-screen. Mayday does have a bit of that bad-movie ridiculousness about it — it’s terrible in a mildly entertaining way (wait until you get a longer glimpse at the demon!), and you can see opportunities that a better film would have taken. I’m not necessarily against this kind of low-budget thriller at all: I can recall a few other films using the confines of an airplane as an effective way to make good use of a tiny budget. But Mayday simply fumbles the elements at its disposal, or simply doesn’t want to do the work to get to the next level up.

  • Decommissioned (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) It’s almost interesting to see how little Decommissioned does with the big plot points it picks for itself. You’d expect presidential assassinations to be Big Deals, let alone presidential assassination for which the protagonist is being set up by a high-ranking conspiracy—but the way the film goes about it continually undermines and underwhelms the material it’s working with. Tired conspiracy clichés, lame action sequences, faded cinematography, familiar plot beats and bland dialogue all contribute to the film’s lack of impact, even when it has its protagonist staring down a sniper rifle sight with the POTUS in his crosshairs. It’s true that Decommissioned isn’t aiming high by design — it is, after all, a low-budget actioneer that tries its best to stretch a limited production budget. It’s meant for the direct-to-streaming market in which you’re good as long as you come in under-budget and can cut a halfway-intriguing title/premise/trailer package to attract buyers. It stars some low-budget stalwarts as Vinnie Jones (in a cameo), Estella Warren and Michael Pare, does its best with creative direction (praise to Timothy Woodward Jr., I guess, although I would have liked to see Roel Reiné take a crack at that material) and seemingly sticks close to Los Angeles for the action. It could have been worse — and the fact that we’re discussing the mismatch of the film against its ambitions is indicative that it tries to punch above its weight. But the disconnect between the ambitious premise and the cost-effective execution is the lame script, which seems to have been written in a week and never tries to do anything but the most obvious thing at every turn. You can talk about premise and ambition and all that, but the final proof is always in the execution, and there’s no way to see Decommissioned without feeling let-down.