South of Heaven (2021)
(On Cable TV, May 2022) Look, filmmakers: You can’t just declare your film to be neo-noir and expect that everyone will agree with you out of sympathy – you have to put some work into it, and make sure you at least understand the aesthetic and thematic core of noir. Or you can do like writer-director Aharon Keshales does in South of Heaven and just throw up stuff in the movie without really caring whether it’s tonally consistent, whether it undercuts other parts of the film, whether it’s the best use of the actors or whether it’s more than a blend of predictable tropes and incoherent plotting. You can, sometimes, see the glimpses of a more successful film in South of Heaven… if only it could stick to an approach for more than five minutes, or at least try to execute the familiar clichés in an engaging fashion. Instead, we get an ex-felon returning to his dying wife, getting embroiled in a criminal overlord’s sombre schemes out of sheer happenstance (even though there are plenty of hints about him being tempted by criminal activity), reacting in interesting ways, but seeing his plans unravel in dark comic fashion. There are about five and a half genres in that brief plot summary alone, and the film itself is no better when watched one minute after another. Featuring Evangeline Lily in the worst imaginable haircut and a miscast Jason Sudeikis acting tough, South of Heaven makes too many mistakes to avoid being ridiculed. At some point, everything the film does, every choice it makes simply feels like a wrong one. It whiplashes from comedy to tragedy to suspense to indifference faster than you’d think possible. From time to time, it gets a good idea (such as the protagonist kidnapping his enemy’s son to turn the tables) but blows that lead with something stupid. An unimaginable coincidence powers much of the plot, and the film goes for a moody ending that just screams pretentiousness once we’re already done caring for whatever happens during the action-driven climax. There are misfires and then there’s South of Heaven, a constant far-too-long parade of mismatched script pages glued together. That it’s not a complete failure (thanks to Mike Colter, an audacious one-shot, or occasionally shifts in power relationships) only makes the result feel worse. Skip it – there’s only frustration here.