This one has been sitting in the backlog for a while. Check out our review of Nobody Can Cool.
Vacationing couple Susan (Catherine Annette) and David (David Atlas) venture out into the California mountains and settle for the night in a desolate cabin to collect themselves. Their peaceful getaway quickly turns into a nightmare when they inadvertently stumble upon a criminal couple, Len (Nick Principe) and pregnant Gigi (Nikki Bohm) in the middle of a heist gone awry, forming hard-boiled noir backdrop of Nobody Can Cool. At first it seems like a cut-and-dried hostage scenario, but soon the plot thickens as every character purports an ulterior motive and no one can really be trusted. As the age old saying goes, no one gets away clean.
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| "Hahahahahaha. We love drugs." |
Working
under the pseudonym Dpyx, female writing-producing-directing team Marcy Boyle
and Rachel Holzman’s low budget thriller at first seems like another amateurish
kidnapping plot. Soon however, Nobody Can Cool quickly develops into an
ensemble classic holdup with many guns pointed in all directions, echoing the
likes of such classics as The Petrified
Forest with a dash of Kalifornia thrown
in. Not all of it works as the
characters occasionally make inexplicable decisions most people would laugh at,
including a bizarre interlude where Susan shares a laugh and drink with Len as
she holds a gun to his head. In any
rational situation, letting one’s guard down with alcohol and the proximity
with which the characters are to each other simply comes off as
implausible. That aside, the acting is
good, with Nick Principe turning over the strongest performance as a bald and
tattooed thug with more of a heart than his appearance suggests.
Technical
limitations undeniably stick out like a sore thumb, with rampant digital blood,
digital tinting of day towards night, and a shoddy title sequence that looks to
be assembled via Adobe Photoshop. Using
little more than the vastness of the cabin’s remote location and claustrophobic
interiors, Nobody Can Cool relies
less on production value than the characters’ mutual fight for survival and
fulfilling their own individual agendas.
Something of a sophomore effort from the newly formed filmmaking team,
the overall cheap direct-to-video feel of the piece will likely make most quit
while there ahead. Though a bit talky at
times, for a first time effort Nobody Can
Cool is a decent little thriller with startling moments of violence and
numerous surprises that make it all worthwhile in the end. You could do far worse than many of the
larger mainstream noirs with guns drawn have.
-Andrew Kotwicki
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