c-conley90 Review of Beyond the Trophy

Beyond the Trophy (2012)

Achingly awful Scorsese/Tarantino wannabe.

[1/10 · 10 October 2014]

Made on the fly in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Beverly Hills, is the cheapest version of the Departed ever made. Crooked cop and Mark Whalberg impersonator Stephen Cloud is the main character with the only two good actors resorted to minor roles. By that I mean Madsen and Roberts. Though Madsen is pretty much omnipresent through the whole thing with his weird badly recorded narration that is trying to be Casino. Meanwhile Michael Masini is playing the Leonardo Dicaprio role of this movie as a undercover cop working with Madsen's mob buddies and the plot goes into a messy series of incidents that lead to a lot of people dead and me feeling irritated. Mostly the movie seemed to be shot with a camcorder in someone's home and has that feel through several scenes. Other times bad ADR on Russian Gangsters rears it's ugly head in one scene. And to spoil something Eric Roberts' character dies pointlessly for some reason at the end of the movie. Something that really wasn't needed. And how come Michael Madsen got off with Jail time at the end of this movie? Stephen Cloud is the hero or anti-hero of this movie? What gives? This movie is cheap, it has a cheap car chase scene. Apparently the cast rented out strip club dancers and used those too. Yo Boy or ya boy needs to not have a career in rap. The guns don't even have a flash or muzzle smoke to them, just sounds of guns going off and no squibs. That's how cheap this movie was.