[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img] The railroad bridge in New York called Hell’s Gate got its name, we’re told, on account of lurking above the shipwrecking intersection of two waterways. It’s an ideal place to dispose of inconvenient corpses – divers never find anything dumped there – and a good title for the familiar morality play of a down-on-his-luck felon forced to make difficult choices in a situation that spirals far outside his control.
Familiarity works against the film despite writer/director John Cecil’s strategy to liven things up: fracturing the chronology of events that make up the story of a kidnapping gone awry. Cecil’s gambit works – in conjunction with his stimulating camera work – to the extent it manufactures a structural kind of suspense. Unfortunately, what you see is what you get, even if it’s out of order, and what you get are familiar crime drama genre tropes – the desperate debt-ridden protagonist, the secret-bearing mastermind, the wild card, the damsel in distress – in a plot that gives a workout to the suspension of disbelief. The lack of genuine surprises, of reevaluated first impressions, even carries on to the final revelation of what’s really going on – a humdrum explanation that could have easily been swapped for another humdrum explanation without performing reconstructive surgery on the rest of the film.
Digging Through the Texti-ness
But “Hell’s Gate” is more of a character study than a potboiler, more interested in picking at the characters than thrilling with the plot. Although there’s a spark, here, too, in setting up moral quandaries and character-extracting drama, the results are mixed — fundamentally interesting, but bogged down in that ol’ devil called the details. Talking Heads Syndrome, in which characters blab, without much subtlety, through the plot rather than actually doing anything – puts a huge and unnecessary burden on dialogue to carry the film. Result: Conversations don’t quite ring true, or even plausible, and the film feels more like a radio play than a movie with a full, rich arsenal of non-verbal cues.
It’s a little frustrating, then, to be teased with genuine drama only to see all that intensity dissipate. When the film finally achieves a good momentum – at the point when the kidnapping inevitably begins to unravel – we get some good-to-terrific performances – particularly by Jeremy Cohen, who terrifies with a near-psychotic detonation. The cast can’t fully overcome the texti-ness of the script, but packs enough of a punch to make a few scenes stand well on their own even when they don’t gel as part of a bigger picture. And so there it is, Heck’s Gate rather than Hell’s Gate.
Entertainment Value: * (out of two)
Technical Quality: * (out of two)
Hell's Gate. Echelon Studios presents a film written and directed by John Cecil. Starring Brian Faherty, Ben Dearborn, Teddy Alexandro-Evans and Chelsea Miller. 84 minutes. Visit www.echelonstudios.us for more information.
Frédérik invites discussions at his blog.
