WARNING SHOT is incredibly uneven, vacillating wildly between absolutely superb and almost unwatchable. Even so, I'd call this movie a "must-see" for two reasons. Firstly, the superb parts do qualify as top-quality movie entertainment and are worthwhile in their own right.
But secondly, and I would say fascinatingly, for a film art buff, the nature of its unevenness is unique to my experience and a bit hypnotic. I can't remember ever seeing a movie with such a peculiar lurching back and forth between quality work and low value garbage. You just don't see that sort of thing every day. Movies are usually either one thing or another, and don't rock crazily to and fro between the two.
The plot couldn't be simpler. The up-and-coming grandson member of a small town family of water barons decides to quit messing around and to acquire some outstanding water rights from an old holdout once and for all, no matter what it takes this time. He hires a couple of local hayseed goons to do the dirty work, but when the henchmen arrive at the remote ranch to rough up the old holdout, it turns out that he's died and in his place they find the daughter and granddaughter of the old holdout are just arriving to take up residence in their newly inherited digs. One victim is as good as another goes the local goon logic, and so they kidnap the daughter and granddaughter to begin the process of squeezing the water rights out of them. And the situation begins to degenerate rapidly from there.
The first dish on the Kafkaesque menu of oddities for this movie is its completely unexpected little collection of screen legends, all but fossilized with age, in supporting roles. James Earl Jones and Bruce Dern are both here as an aging family attorney for the good guys and a decrepit, bedridden old patriarch for the bad guys, respectively. Not so fossilized but getting up there at fifty-four years old we also see David Spade as the corner-cutting grandson bad guy trying to please grandpa Dern and playing primary villain for the movie.
Jones, Dern and Spade, collectively, only appear in the movie for maybe fifteen minutes altogether. But Frank Whaley, a very notable and recognizable A list actor in his own right, shows up playing the hapless Bible-thumping proselytizer who accidentally gets sucked into the unfortunate situation when he knocks on the wrong door while trying to sell Jesus.
Aside from Whaley, the movie is almost exclusively carried by the list of professional and competent but uninspired collection of B list actors filling the primary roles. Tammy Blanchard, Onata Aprile and Dwight Henry play the kidnapped mother and daughter and one of the local goons respectively.
While definitely from the list of B actors, especially surprising is the performance turned in by Guillermo Diaz. At first he seems to be just one of the two local goons, a two-dimensional, overall-wearing, hey-chewing doofus prone to guns and violence as the only entertainment his low horsepower IQ can comprehend. But as the movie progresses, he turns out to be a sort of Charlie Manson character, a highly intelligent and insightful student of human psychology and character but sadly damaged into psychopathy from his criminal and traumatic childhood. He emerges as the most interesting character by far as the movie progresses.
But as mentioned, the most fascinating aspect of WARNING SHOT is its wobbling up and down the quality scale.
Examples:
The filmography is generally excellent. Solid, artistic and interesting camera angles, smooth pans and steady set shots, watermarks of experienced and knowledgeable camera work, suddenly give way to "shaky cam" crap because, you know, that's how you're supposed to add action to action shots. Or something. Gives one the sense that the director occasionally fell asleep and his dog took over shooting.
Continuity is all over the place. In one scene, the mother and daughter are desperately trying to escape through the forest and have just forded a relatively small but white-water little river running so hard that it momentarily sucked the mother under. This little river is running so fast it's literally throwing mist into the air as it rushes by. Arriving on the other side of the river, BIP!, suddenly Rainy (the Charlie Manson-like goon) is upon them. He's bone dry, no explanation how he apparently effortlessly got across this river that practically killed the mother and daughter. When the mother finally blasts him in the chest with the revolver she's been carrying for quite a while now, Rainy falls over backwards and then rolls down the embankment into the river. The river that NOW is miraculously as calm and as still as the undisturbed surface of a kiddie pool in a sunny backyard. Huh? Where did the killer river go?
The best explanation for such cinematic Swiss cheese is an inexperienced and unsure hand in the director's chair. And when we check the credits, we find that the director, Dustin Fairbanks, has a very short list of credits to his name altogether, and exactly one credit as a director which is... You guessed it... WARNING SHOT.
On the positive side, all of this suggests that when he can get himself settled down and smoothed out we can hope to see good stuff from Mr. Fairbanks in the future. He seems to show lots of promise.
The 7/10 rating I gave WARNING SHOT is based upon the fact that much of it was excellent but also because of the opportunity for a learning experience that it uniquely provides the viewer. Some may find my ranking a bit generous.
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