Internal bleeding dance FTW.

Jesus Christ, this is a strange film. Ha. It is hard to even review. In several respects, I admire and am fascinated by it, yet I also sense it is a type of failure or misfire overall. The story, or at least the way it will be sold, is fairly simple: an arch, comic action film focused on two beautiful hit girls (Alexis Bledel, Saoirse Ronan) whose latest target is played by the late James Gandolfini. Except it turns out he is not playing the type of hard, powerful gangster in which he specialized, but instead a terminal cancer patient plagued by domestic failures and regrets who commits a heist and taunts the criminals from whom he stole, trusting they will send people to end his life: suicide by mob. The hit is complicated when the girls cannot comprehend the idea of an eager target and try to discover his motive.

Released without fanfare in select cities a couple days before the iconic actor's abrupt death in Rome, the film cannot help but be transformed to a certain extent by the tragic real-life events encircling it: his riveting portrayal of a sad eyed, unloved man staring mortality in the face is intended as melancholy, but it instead disturbs and stings in a much more profound way. There is magic within the quiet scenes of dialogue he shares with Ronan, playing the more naive and sensitive of the two pint sized assassins.

Alas, the authenticity of this side of the film and the sensations it arouses only emphasizes the self-conscious mediocrity of so many of its other elements. There is the arbitrary division of the slow-paced story into ten chapters, each announced with an ambiguous, quote-unquote hip title ("Photosynthesis," "Nine Divided by One"). There are the halfhearted moments of macabre pop humor (the girls slaughter a group of henchmen in nun costumes! one of them stands atop a pile of bloodied corpses in a tub to shower!) which harshly rub against the more humane, and more intriguing, moments of drama. In general, Violet & Daisy emerges as a film which does its best to stunt seeds of genuine depth, fascination, and potential with see-ma-no-hands stylistic curlicues of the post-Tarantino variety, which is a shame.

C+

I talked to Danny Trejo about three years ao, when has was already done (!) shooting this and he said that the director was too far up his ass all the time, hehe.