A Dark Reflection *
Dir: Tristan Loraine. Starring: Georgina
Sutcliffe, Rita Ramnani, Marina Sirtis, Mark Dymond, Nicholas Day, Stephen
Tompkinson. 15 cert, 102 mins
The
eccentric Brit indie A Dark Reflection
squanders time and money on entirely the wrong things. Given that
writer-director Tristan Loraine is railing against the industry cost-cutting
that has reportedly seen carbon monoxide seep into passenger-jet cabins, some
logging of airmiles was clearly necessary; as suggested by his 2009 debut 31 North 62 East – a Crawley-set
political conspiracy thriller, currently in heavy rotation on the Movies4Men
channel – Loraine is your go-to guy for soaring helicopter shots of the South
Downs. What’s back on the ground, however, stays woefully, often comically
under-resourced. The film’s head is forever in the clouds.
Loraine, a
sometime pilot, may very well have news to break, yet the template into which
he’s copied-and-pasted it resembles a Poundland Silkwood: a once-jetsetting journo (Georgina Sutcliffe) – now
relegated to a dispiriting reporter’s beat on the Sussex Standard – regains her
crusading zeal while investigating the affairs of the coyly fictionalised
“JaspAir”. So we know who to boo, the blustering Sir Charles Jaspar (Nicholas
Day) is shown hunting pheasants as his planes tumble (unseen) from the skies;
his wife (Marina Sirtis, from Star Trek)
establishes her credentials by wondering aloud what a chore it must be to have
to rent one’s living quarters.
These
straw people at least have some shape about them. Everywhere else you look,
your gaze alights on underdirected performers having to frame threats to the
layman in scenes that plod on far beyond their natural cut point: poor Stephen
Tompkinson, drafted in for a one-scene favour as a green-skinned
organophosphate victim, only reminds one of Drop
the Dead Donkey’s hapless danger-junkie Damien Day. Loraine’s planning a
follow-up doc on this subject, and that – providing the budget goes on anything
other than McDonnell-Douglasses – might just play; however well-intentioned and
informed, this tinny and tensionless dispatch really doesn’t.
A Dark Reflection opens in selected cinemas from today.
No comments:
Post a Comment