ANGEL OF DEATH
From Crackle:
Not bad. If you like Grindhouse. And I mean the post-Tarantino version of the genre.
I found this generally disappointing largely because I've been reading (Angel of Death writer) Ed Brubaker for years in the funnybooks and I know what he's capable of it and this...this ain't it. His stuff is unflinchingly intelligent. Looking at his crime comics like Criminal, I was expecting something more than oblique coolisms and ridiculous amounts of violence. This just really came off as him an aping of Tarantino. Paul Etheredge's direction also, though he was doing some interesting things of his own. I think he, us, everything would have been better served if maybe he adapted something out Criminal, that is if he wanted to a straight up girls, guns and money story.
Yesterday's LA times had an article about comic writers and their ready-made-for-the screen products (let's not even get into how right that is (very) and how wrong it is (because it so frequently gets the thing that made it ready studio-noted out of it)). And it highlighted Brubaker and Angel of Death. And it made me think, why didn't he bring his comic book sensibility to the screen rather than riffing on the post-Reservoir Dogs version of crime flicks. The end of the first episode made me laugh...and not in the way that might have been intended.
Even his more comic booky stuff, like the recent Incognito, a pulpy crime book about a super-villain,would have been much more interesting (to me) anyway.
At least his Sleeper (a fantastic crime/conspiracy/super-powered story) is getting made into a movie by Cruise et al. Hopefully they don't eject everything that made it interesting to them in the first place. Though there does seem to be a new wave of actually taking comics and making them into movies instead of making movies that are similar to but not them (Hellblazer, such a lost opportunity).