Throwdown hits DVD 10/14/2014 from Lionsgate Home Entertainment
The writer of this film’s script, Wes Miller, contacted us to discuss some of the film’s themes and his take on our review including corrections of some points we made. We had a great discussion with him, and we’re all about having this kind of dialogue. We’re grateful to Mr. Miller for taking time to interact with us, and have appended some of his comments to the end of this review.
When one sees that a movie is titled Throwdown, and stars Vinnie Jones, Danny Trejo, and Luke Goss, one tends to feel justified in making certain assumptions. That the film is unlikely to be a legal thriller would be among them, if for no other reason than giving a legal thriller the title Throwdown makes no fucking sense at all. And according to the behind the scenes featurette, the original title was Beyond Justice, which is slightly more appropriate, if somehow even more generic.
But a legal thriller Throwdown is, against all common sense and logic. Which is a… fascinating turn, to say the least.
And as it happens, “fascinating” is a good phrase to use in describing the film itself. And, if fascinating meant the exact same thing as ‘good’, we’d really have a party going. But it doesn’t, so… here we are.
The first thing to note about Throwdown is, despite being prominently featured on the cover, neither Danny Trejo, Vinnie Jones, or Luke Goss could be considered the stars of the film. In fact, judging from Trejo’s limited and basically tangential role in the proceedings, and the extremely careful word selection in the behind the scenes featurette, it seems more than possible that Trejo didn’t even know the name of his director or who else was starring with him in the movie.
No, the honor of protagonist goes to one Timothy Woodward Jr, who also happens to be the director of the piece. And if that previous sentence makes you apprehensive, well… of course it does.
The story is intriguing, after a fashion: Woodward plays Jaxon Stone, a criminal defense attorney who is convinced by the alluring Amanda Torres (Erin Marie Hogan) to defend her brother Juan (Jerry G. Angelo), accused of the rape of Selena Lopez (Sammy Durrani) and the murder of her husband. Juan insists on pleading guilty and is resistant to accepting Stones’ help, but Stone is insistent, and soon uncovers secrets that would be shocking in a world where there were zero versions of Law And Order in existence.
So, then: the twist that makes things interesting is the arrival of Vincent Delacruz, played by Vinnie Jones, who is exactly the sort of actor you’d expect to find playing a character named Delacruz. As the father of the murdered man, Delacruz hires Stone under false pretenses and then reveals his true identity, threatening Stone with an ultimatum: make sure Juan is exonerated, and then hand him over; or Stone’s life is forfeit.
This is an interesting, if unlikely, story to branch off of. Certainly, there is potential here. And to understand how and why that potential is squandered, we must now wander into the wonderful world on mild spoilers.
More than being a mere grieving father, Delacruz is in fact a criminal mastermind who runs a human trafficking network, where he imports underage girls and puts them to work on the streets. This is a plot that is only vaguely related to anything else in the main story, in spite what everyone in the cast would seemingly have you believe. The prominence of these grimy, unpleasant aspects in are way, WAY out of proportion to their actual importance to the resolution of the film itself.
And so what ultimately fells Throwdown is the dissonance between its pulpy, John Grisham-style courtroom theatrics and the seamy, skeevy, borderline torture porn aspects in the Trejo sequences. But let’s not gloss over the other problems, because that would be unfair to the rest of the films’ many, many flaws.
There seems to be a distinct disinterest in crafting anything remotely resembling character. As the main female characters in the film, Durrani and Hogan are given little to do, and suffer from looking so similar that I often spent entire scenes trying to figure out which of them I was watching. In fact, this seems to be a strangely present problem in the film overall: with the exception of Mischa Barton (who actually acquits herself pretty well as the de riguer incompetent prosecutor, pun only intended in retrospect), all of the women in the movie seems to be cast from a worrying similar aesthetic mold.
Seasoned vets like Trejo and Jones can coast on their not inconsiderable charisma, but that doesn’t do you a whole hell of a lot of good when your main hero is such a lump.
As Stone, Woodward isn’t terrible, but he’s pretty flat and charmless. I give him points for handling the courtroom scenes with an unexpected attack dog intensity and for steadfastly refusing to turn his everyman-type character into an action hero. But that’s about as far as I’m willing to go. A performer with more presence might be able to redeem the proceedings a bit, but then again it’s just as likely that pretty much any actor would be defeated by a script this half-baked.
This is the kind of script where the hero has a traumatic incident in his past that doesn’t affect his behavior at all, except that it gives him a drinking problem that is mentioned two times and then goes on to also not affect the story at any point. It’s also the kind of script where Stone and Amanda go on to have the most poorly motivated, weirdly elliptical sex scene in the history of movies (they don’t even kiss or touch! How is that even possible?) And where the defendant in question, despite fully intending to plead guilty and making it clear he’ll refuse to work with Stone, somehow is unable to waive his right to counsel.
Again: all fascinating. But not, you know, good.
Woodward does little better as a director than he does as an actor, purposely choosing to shoot in almost entirely close-ups and with a shaky camera that only serves to make things worse.
And yet, it’s these half-assed and ill-advised measures that lend the movie what oddball interest it contains.
Without going into spoilers, the actual ending of the movie redirects the focus, revealing that maybe the heroes of the film weren’t exactly who we thought they were. How all this plays out is somewhat interesting, but also mostly unsatisfying, due to how little effort was put in to giving the eventual survivors actual dimensions. A more astute writer (the script is credited to Wes Miller, with “additional scenes” by Jack Ulrich) could have woven this thematic outcome into the narrative a little smoother so that it didn’t seem quite as random and unsatisfying as it ultimately comes off, but as it stands, it’s a twist that refuses to play.
And so, in the end, we have a film that doesn’t work, but isn’t fully without interest. It’s thankfully short, and so never overstays its welcome. But it also never manages to reconcile its two sides or invest it with the life it needs to come together.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
The aforementioned behind the scenes short, which somehow manages to talk to only 1/8th of the cast, including almost none of the pivotal characters; trailers; and apparently they’re still trying to pass that Ultraviolet nonsense as a special feature. Nice try guys, but we clearly have differing ideas on what “value added” means…
A note from THROWDOWN writer Wes Miller
Dear Cinapse team,
I am the writer of Beyond Justice, renamed Throwdown by the distributor. Your analysis was in depth and I appreciate your eye for story. I slightly hesitate to write this as I do not want to seem as if I am the bitter artist and cannot handle negative criticism. This does not come from this place. This comes from a place of education through my first experience working on a feature film. There is one point that I would like to address. The review takes issue with specific events included and excluded in the script (“This is the kind of script where…”). I would like to say that the screenplay did incorporate the traumatic event into Stone’s character arc that led to alcohol to cope which directly affected the main plot and in fact was the cataclysm that led to his change. And second, the non-kissing, weird sex scene was not included in the screenplay.
Because this isn’t designed to be a rebuttal to the review, I’m not attempting to change the reviewer’s opinion of the movie. Instead, we do have to be careful when specifically laying the faults of a film at the feet of the script; especially in lower budget productions. Many things play into how a screenplay is brought to the screen such as budget, creative choices, location availability, and cast availability. So, often times it’s hard to attribute success and failure of films between the creative and universal forces without being on set during the production. Just a small note and thanks for listening.
— Wes Miller