Screwback (2004) User Reviews

Classy Noir

[seqproone · 10/10 · 22 August 2008]

I have to disagree strongly with So-so's review, he seems to want everything explained rather than reading between the lines. There's a lot going on in this 10 minutes, in fact its like watching the opening 10 mins of a top notch gangster thriller.

And so on to my review.....

Its a hardboiled noir-ish thriller in the vein of Point Blank/Get Carter. Its about an ex-gangster blackmailed into doing one last job, but like any good short film it turns the whole thing on its head by the end. It sounds fairly run of the mill plot wise, but with a couple of brilliant twists, some suggestive story telling and a very dark, sinister mood it manages to rise to the top, making for a seriously good short.

Its very slick and stylish, comparable to anything out of Hollywood and manages to cram a feature film into 10 mins. If you like Michael Mann, Scorsese, Takeshi Kitano, John woo and Brian DePalma you'll love this, as the director clearly comes from their school of film-making. Its up on www.atomfilms.com and its well worth a look.

So-so

[nospam78 · 4/10 · 15 November 2006]

There's not a whole lot of plot in this movie, nothing much is explained, it just seems to aim for a general hard-boiled noir feel. Which it does more or less, but it seems kind of pointless. It just feels like they were too lazy to put a story together, or make you care about the characters. And now IMDb is telling me I can't submit this comment until it is at least ten lines long, but it hardly seems worth bothering about. Oh well, let me just conclude by saying that if you're up late at night flipping through the cable channels, and nothing else is on, you might as well kill ten minutes by watching this thing. But it's not worth going out of your way to watch.