Andrew reviews the recently released Phantom Halo.
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| "Don't you go giving my movie a bad review, son." |
It’s a given that great directors don’t always bestow
their filmmaking gifts unto their offspring.
Where those like Sofia Coppola have managed to set themselves apart from
their paternal influences, others like Jennifer Lynch can’t help but live in
the shadow of their father’s career.
Such is the case with Phantom Halo,
the writing-directing debut of Peter Bogdanovich’s daughter Antonia, which
aspires to be everything The Last Picture
Show was while ultimately coming up with even less than The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.
A confused and undercooked crime drama about a family
consisting of an alcoholic father and his two pickpocketing sons struggling to
pay off insurmountable debts as dad continues to blow their cash on more booze,
it’s a tonal mess that can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. Is it about an abusive father, a counterfeit
scheme or unspoken mafia lingo? Before
you have a moment to settle into one genre, it abruptly shifts to another via
yet another schmaltzy montage set to cringe inducing Christian rock and faux
gangster-rap. It wouldn’t be so jarring
if it weren’t so damn inconsistent.
Wanting to be another coming-of-age teenage drama
about familial hardship and optimism in the face of adversity via one’s
escapist devotion to the comic book, I was taken aback by just how much this
film copied Altar Boys, both in
content and corniness. The manipulative
sentimentality and farcical plot developments of Altar Boys and Phantom Halo
(a completely misleading title by the way) almost seem spoken of the same
breath and when the forced moments attempting to tug at your heartstrings come
they barely register. I kept looking for
reasons to care about the characters even after the closing credits despite the
halfway decent performances here. The
cast is largely solid with Rebecca Romjin still pretty to look at despite the
role being ultimately thankless and Tobin Bell (Jigsaw from Saw fame) has fun with his mobster cameo
appearance. Thomas Brodie-Sangster as
Samuel, an innocent teen obsessed with a comic book superhero named Phantom
Halo, holds his own against his older brother Beckett (Luke Kleintank) and
their drunken father Warren (Sebastian Roche).
The problem is their talents are underutilized with performances that
are serviceable but largely go through the motions thanks to the mediocrity of
the script.
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| "Now you really pissed off your mom. She told you not to give it a bad review. You're grounded." |
More than halfway into Phantom Halo, which felt like forever despite only being 87
minutes, I asked myself when something interesting and/or new was going to
happen. We’ve seen this movie demonstrated
before in infinitely better alternative examples you could follow and buy into
despite occasional contrivances. Here,
it’s all over the place and while not as patently absurd as Altar Boys, it comes pretty close in
moments. At the very least, Altar Boys explored the need for
escapist entertainment in the face of personal hardship where this one only
goes as far as, well, that must be what teenagers are into. It’s a pity neither movie really works
because in both there’s a worthwhile story capable of being told as a
compelling picture. But if I had to pick
between one film or another, I’d choose The
Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.
Whether it worked or not, it managed to hold my attention with a
protagonist you could empathize with. It
was a struggle, on the other hand, to stay even remotely invested in Phantom Halo.
Score
-Andrew Kotwicki
