Atone

Sometimes it's fun to dive into the world of DTV movies. It's brilliant when one of those dives uncovers buried treasure. A film that has gone totally under the radar and you feel like you're the only one to know about it. It's a thrill that makes all the time you've wasted watching absolute dross seem worthwhile. I took a chance with Atone the other night. An action film with an African American woman in the lead role. You don't see many films like this around so it's always good to give them a whirl. Sadly I did not uncover buried treasure this time. Atone is diabolically bad.

Laura Bishop is a woman in mourning after her husband's death exactly a year ago. To shake her out of herself her father gets her a job working security for the largest church in America. On her first day in the job the church is targeted by a gang of masked robbers who want access to the church's finances and they are a gang of people who have no issues with killing innocent civilians to get their way. But like every robber in every film ever made they also have deeper reasons fueling their motivations. Will this turn of events help Laura to dig herself out of the dark hole she's been trapped in?

This was septic. A bag of absolute muck. A horrifically acted pro-gun and pro-church action flick that throws every cliche under the sun at the screen while looking like it was made for about $263. Nothing about it works. It looks like it was filmed on a Nokia 3210 and it's action scenes are as shoddy as you'll ever see. No lie, there's stuff here would wouldn't seem out of place in an episode of Mrs Brown's Boys. It's so bad that you can't even laugh at it. One of the joys of watching a bad movie is taking the piss out of it. You can't do that here. It's so bad it just makes you feel bad about yourself for watching it. Character motivations are beyond scrambled and it has the feel of a script that was rewritten on a daily basis or whenever the screenwriters came up with a new idea. It's so shit that it won't even turn up on netflix. Think about that. 

Nothing makes sense. The bad guy ( A black man called White, won't think about that too much) is on a righteous mission for revenge against the church but murders innocent folk left, right and centre. It's hard to take a story about the darkside of organised religion seriously with mixed messages like that bombarding you. Then a final scene revelation about forgiveness pisses all over everything that has come before. It's a moment so apocalyptically screwy that when the credits finally run (89 minutes has never felt so long) you'll sit there with your gob agape wondering what the fuck you've just watched.

Laura is played by Jaqueline Fleming, an actress who's been hovering around the edge of Hollywood for a few years now. Whoever told her this would be her big break needs a slap. This is career ending stuff. It's just astoundingly bad. I really feel sorry for her. Columbus Short as the bad guy is lucky enough to have a mask on most of the time so we can't see just how embarrassed he is by all this. He gives a performance that blazes with shame. A bizarre addition to the cast is Stephen Farrelly, an Irish WWE wrestler better known as Seamus. When I heard his Dublin accent I perked up assuming he'd add a touch of much needed fun to proceedings but no, he's awful too as a murderer who must bless himself everytime he kills. At one stage, and this is no lie, he bursts out laughing and the camera cuts away fast. When the film makers can't even be arsed to properly edit out bloopers you know you're on a hiding to nothing.

One of the weirdest things about American entertainment is they way they embrace bloody violence while being ultra coy about profanity. In this film bloody headshots are ten a penny but the strongest language is "Son of a gun." It's such a bizarre utterance that it instantly pulls you out of the movie. I contemplated turning the film off at this point but out of curiousity I continued. The film had surely reached it's nadir at that point. It couldn't actually get worse could it?? 

Oh reader. It did get worse. So much worse.