Tropic Sprockets / Fight or Flight

By Ian Brockway

James Madigan (Iron Man 2) has created a cartoonish and colorful action thriller that vibrates with verve and energy despite its silliness. Bubbly, quirky, and gory with a dreamlike and fetishist preoccupation with violence as an exclamation point, the film is entertaining with a sense of the absurd. [Showtimes and trailer at Tropiccinema.com]

Lucas (Josh Hartnett) is a former agent hiding out because he broke the law with his extremely violent anger issues. Out of the blue, he gets a call from his estranged dominatrix agent girlfriend (Katee Sackhoff) who tells him that if he completes this task, he will walk as a free man with his lethal record expunged.

Lucas reluctantly agrees.

He is tasked with bringing the subversive Isha (Charithra Chandran) into custody. But there is one obstacle: Lucas is on a plane full of hit men and women out to kill him for the bounty target.

What follows is a madcap and absurdist slugfest that is as much a cacophony as it is a cartoon with the barbarity reaching levels of loud ballet. Who knew how many varieties of ways a lunch tray could be used as a weapon?

If the episodes of percussive blood belching are too much, such aversion is well taken. However, the motion and mayhem on display is so highly charged and manic to the extreme that the film has a weird rhythm of pulp poetry. Weirdness, machismo, aggression, and circus-like histrionics are all used in making a barbaric Bugs Bunny show of blood and gore. The blood by itself makes The Overlook Hotel in “The Shining” seem like a yoga retreat.

Even though the film is in one singular key of scarlet, the energy has a surrealism combined with an offhand tone that never takes itself seriously.

Both Charithra Chandran and Josh Hartnett possess a facile shallow ease that is a cartoon in itself. The film is more amiable and less self-conscious than the “John Wick” franchise.

Not much in this film makes sense but it is not supposed to: the bone-crunching and spastic savagery creates its own atonal aggression and John Cage caterwauling, nihilist and nonsensical. This is a Looney Toon Parade, a Rube Goldberg rodeo of blood, dismembered heads and haunches illustrated in Saturday matinee lines. It is more Three Stooges than three films by Tarantino and the punches in the gut are easier to take with no salt-sting of Reality in the eye.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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