“Cool” is the lifeblood of an indie thriller.
Park your tale in a novel “cool” setting. Serve up a “cool” heist/scheme/plot, preferably with epic brawls, chases or shootouts. Cast a cool heavy.
But even if you ignore or narrowly miss in securing every bit of cool cachet listed above, you’ve got to have a cool lead character and a star that pops off the screen.
“Jade” is a B-movie thriller built around British newcomer Shaina West. The plot is potboiler simple — rival gangs and rival cops and a stolen hard drive shoot and chase and kill each other in and around the mean streets of “The 505,” aka Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But West? She’s the real deal.
Our title character is five feet and four inches — not including the biggest Afro since Sly Stone — of muscle and attitude. “Jade” is a big-haired, halter-topped harpy with a convoluted back story parked in a convoluted present that she’s boiled down to the basics.
She’s got to keep herself alive in a tiff between “The Club” she once belonged to and its rivals. She’s hellbent on protecting Layla (Katherine McNamara), who is carrying the unborn child of Layla’s dead brother.
She’s going to have her revenge on anybody who interferes with her limited agenda or had anything to do with her brother’s death, even if she was the one who pulled the trigger back then, even if she “swore to never shoot another gun for as long as she’s living.”
And God help you if she gets her hands on a samurai sword.
Stunt players pepper the cast of heavies out to take down our heroine. They catch her and lose her, catch and lose her, catch and lose her and catch and lose her again. But director James Bamford, fight choreographer Daniel Joseph Rizzuto and West always always conjure up a way to get her out of those pull ties, off that chair she’s lashed to, punching and slashing through whatever mob minions escort her to “the basement” or “the meet” or wherever.
The cleverest/dumbest of these has to be her conning her way out of bondage via a game of “five finger fillet” with “discount Brad Pitt.”
She’s tortured, friends are tortured or taken hostage. And gangsters who tire of all the torturing just pull the trigger.
Mickey Rourke plays Tork, villain amongst villains and so strange looking at this stage of his post-boxing/post-botox/post-plastic surgery career that you kind of wish he’d limit himself to voicing villains in animation. Even Jade is moved to mock his rough impersonation of having “eyebrows.”
West shows us flashes of charisma and excellent fight choreography skills. She’s going to have to grow into finding and keeping her game face/panic face in a thriller where Jade never seems all that alarmed at her peril or concerned at her many injuries.
“WTF HAPPENED to you?”
“EVERYTHING!”
West is steady with a trash talk line, but undercut somewhat by a screenplay that doesn’t give her enough of them.
“Always bet on Black,” she cracks, quoting Wesley Snipes in “Passenger 57.” “I just always wanted to say that.”
None of the supporting characters is developed to any degree, and that adds to a feeling of confusion and “cheating” when this or that “twist” pops up. Bamford and his fellow screenwriters don’t set the stakes and the players playing for those stakes up well. At all.
But the gonzo fights that begin the moment Jade peels off her hoodie to show off her six-pack and her swordswomanship make this B-picture just cool enough to get by.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Katherine McNamara, Mathew Yanagiya, Marcus Vincios Maciel, Mark Dacascos and “introducing Shaina West as Jade.”
Credits: Directed by James Bamford, scripted by Lynn Collier, Glenn Ennis and James Bamford. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:29
Movie Nation 