Detective Knight: Independence opens with an armed bank robbery, all filmed at gun level in the familiar manner of a first-person shooter; and it ends with an armed robbery of the same bank, and then a getaway involving a hijacked ambulance, police humvees and a helicopter, during which one of the robbers will exclaim: “Fuck,…
In the last phase of his career, one-time blockbusting actor Bruce Willis has become a regular collaborator with indie writer/director Edward Drake (Broil, 2020). As well as co-writing John Suits’ Anti-Life (2020) and Chuck Russell’s Paradise City (2022) as vehicles for Willis, Drake himself has directed Willis in American Siege (2021), Apex (2021), Cosmic Sin…
Gasoline Alley opens in a Los Angeles bar, where Jimmy Jayne (an excellent, lived-in turn from Devon Sawa), drinking alone in the wee hours, is approached by a pretty woman, Star (Irina Antonenko). “I just sensed you were a man running from shadows,” she says to him, as though he were a grizzled noir antihero and…
The word ‘broil’ has two senses: on the one hand, it refers, whether as verb or noun, to a violent argument or brawl; and on the other, it is a verb that denotes roasting, and a noun for roasted meat. All these associations will eventually be brought into play in Edward Drake’s Broil, although the…