Dirs: Alan Delabie, Michael Morris. With: Alan Delabie, Michael Morris, Shaina West, Jo Price. 90 mins. Cert: 15
This may prove the most curious item to hit UK screens all year: the latest in a run of microbudget calling cards for hulking French martial artist Alan Delabie, who co-writes, co-directs, composes some of the incidental music, and would probably even do you a theme tune if it got him closer to the Expendables gig. Last year’s straight-to-streaming The Shepherd Code introduced Delabie’s Alex “the Shepherd” Lapierre, not the dutiful sheepherder that title conjures, but a hired assassin striving to go straight, with inevitable complications. Now this series generates a theatrical sequel, despite persisting with a look that more readily recalls home movies than those kickboxer flicks starring Don “The Dragon” Wilson (a guest star here) that went straight-to-VHS three decades ago.
The economics at play would seem haphazard at best. Some cash has been splashed on locations: the Shepherd is rejoined swerving his narky former colleagues in a lavish Portuguese villa with adjacent boating facilities, before clodhopping to Paris, L.A. and London (naturally introduced via filler footage of Tower Bridge) or their green-screen equivalents. Yet Delabie and co-writer/director/star Michael Morris fill every last one of these destinations with friends and associates who spend the ensuing vengeance saga mumbling and muttering. Between the copious dead air and abundant dead wood, we’re not so very far from a French-accented remake of Michael Flatley’s infamous Blackbird.
Prone to baleful off-camera stares as if waiting to pass an understirred protein shake, Delabie has some sort of presence, should the movies require a greying, vigorously tatted hybrid of Jean Reno and Gael García Bernal. Yet his script needed a few more leg days, while his pacing negates any thick-eared pleasures: it takes fully thirty minutes to approach anything like a fistfight, time filled by hapless exposition, randomly inserted flashbacks and placement for somebody’s wine label. British-Ghanaian fighter Shaina West belatedly raises the film’s pulse, wielding iron bars and a resplendent Pam Grier afro as a potential Shepherdess; points, too, for a leftfield Frozen reference (“in the words of Elsa, you need to let that shit go”), but like so much of this burly fumble, it’s not quite there.
The Shepherd Code: Road Back opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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