Writer and Director: Kat Candler
Starring: Aaron Paul, Juliette Lewis, Josh Wiggins, Deke Garner
Certificate: 15
Aaron Paul takes on his first meaty screen role since Breaking Bad in this unremarkable but well-acted drama about a fragmented family in the aftermath of grief. Debut feature director Kat Candler has adapted the story from her short, and pitches us right into the action with a jerky, hand-held sequence of teenagers causing chaos. This naturalistic, vaguely off-the-cuff style continues throughout as we meet Jacob, his friends and his equally out of control family.
By far the best aspect of the film is the way Candler has handled her young cast. As the lead Josh Wiggins has the look of Matt Damon and on this assured evidence a decent future lies ahead. Good support comes from Deke Garner as his wide-eyed brother and Candler cleverly casts former teen actress Juliette Lewis as their aunt who finds herself looking after Garner when father Hollis goes off the rails. Jacob’s gang boasts a range of confident turns, often not a given with budding young talent. The main acting draw for many is obviously adult lead and executive producer Paul and there’s a reason for that – the intense underdog qualities he brought to his most famous role as Jesse Pinkman are well-served. Resembling a baby auditioning for ZZ Top, Paul is highly watchable and his star quality is pretty much guaranteed here. Refreshingly Hollis’s alcoholic tendencies are not hammered home at first, so in a sense we discover how adrift he’s become when the kids do, as the authorities show up at their door.
Curtis Heath’s elegant soundtrack put me in mind of the score for Michael Mann’s HEAT and I’d have preferred some of Mann’s sparse but bold styling for RETRIBUTION. There’s a muted feel to proceedings with nothing that really stirred this viewer. Lip service is paid to the theme of innocence lost with both Jacob and Wes dipping into The Swiss Family Robinson (something that would have been worth developing perhaps) but overall there’s not enough insight. Jacob sees Motocross as a means of escape but Candler doesn’t do enough to show us quite why he likes it so much, and the race sequences could have been executed more dynamically in my opinion. Candler probably isn’t too thrilled about the generic re-titling of the movie – RETRIBUTION has virtually nothing to do with the story, and the original name HELLION worked better.
This is solid material but the overall impression is that of a workmanlike slice of drama rather than anything substantial. As the credits roll after a moving climax, was it the best idea to crank up Metallica’s Metal Militia…? Maybe Jacob’s sense of youthful exuberance wasn’t as crushed at first thought.
[usr=3] RETRIBUTION is out on the 12th January on DVD and Blu-Ray.
