Charlie Countryman
★★
Dir: Fredrik Bond
(2013)
Shia LeBeouf and Rachel Evan Wood fail to muster the chemistry to make this drug tinged, semi spiritual crime caper into the love story it really wants to be. Charlie Countryman (LeBeouf) flees from Chicago at the behest of his dead mother (Melissa Leo) to Bucharest but his bad luck continues when the Romanian man sitting next to him on the plane also dies. Seemingly cursed with the ability to take last request from the recently deceased, Charlie vows to the mans ghost to deliver a gift to his daughter, Gabi (Wood). It's love at first sight of course; The only hitch is that Gabi is married to the psychotic Nigel (Mads Mikkelsen) who involves poor hang-dog Charlie in a noir inspired caper with little bite.
Where as Rian Johnson's near perfect contemporary noir Brick was proud to use the genre's dialogue almost verbatim; Drawing out something long-lost in cinema. Sadly, commercial director Fredrik Bond's Charlie Countryman is infected with the knowing sensibility of a post Tarantino audience. We start at the end, characters wit is inspired and insightful one minute and gone the next but more than that, the heart of the film is lost under a 4/4 heart beat soundtrack and slow-motion posturing.
It's definitely a wild and somewhat deranged ride which desperately tries to spark fires with an audacity we've all seen before but LeBeouf plays Charlie with enough gusto to just see us through. Wood's plays it cold in an effort to be convincing in a foreign role but the love between the two is terribly mismatched and through no fault of her own the whole romance seems completely unbelievable. Harry Potter's red-headed Rupert Grint (making a Radcliffesuqe attempt to shed Hogwarts) plays one of Charlie's messed up hostel mates; A wanna be porn star with the nom de porn of Boris Pecker. Hilarious as that is, it's the films finest joke.
With a wasted second villain named Darko (a totally underused Til Schweiger) trying to back up a crazed Mikkelson in some way or another, the danger and intrigue of Charlie Countryman ends up diffusing, diluting and confusing in equal measure. A fine cast can't squeeze enough out of this bonkers film. It's certainly no Seven Psychopaths (surely the scriptwriter owes a few bucks to Martin McDonagh), a film which walked crazily enough from the get-go for you to know it meant business. And, though attempting to exist in a similar world to Brick, it never ever comes close with the sometimes embarrassing dialogue and look of the film hitting you like a bad LSD flashback to the mid nineties.
