When I sat down to watch XPENDABLE, I only knew that writer-director Walter Haussner had used an Evan Hunter short story, "The Final Spin," as a launching point for his film. The thrust of the "The Final Spin" is that rival gangs in an unspecified town decide to settle a turf war with a game of Russian roulette. It's a brief, bleak and tragic tale, told in 7 dialogue-driven pages.
That Haussner expands on the story with a 30-minute narrative is not surprising; what is unexpected is his brilliant twist and embellishment on Hunter's theme. That curveball begins at 8:55 minutes into the film, with the arrival of Josephine Tilly, played by Annette Buchanan McGregor. Her simultaneously gravelly and sonorous voice provides a moral compass, as brutal as it may be, that gives XPENDABLE its ultimate and unsentimental depth. The connection between McGregor's Josephine and the film's main character, Frankie, played with authentic commitment by Preston Mead, lifts Xpendable into the stratosphere of film noir's richest themes of fatalism and disillusionment, where they bond over the wreckage of their mutually miserable lives, and embark on what we hope, against all odds, to be a road to redemption.
Technically, Haussner's jack-of-all-trades skills are on full display; trenchant dialogue, full-on chiaroscuro lighting, and a willingness to let his actors go, warts and all, on dueling monologues of unflinching emotional intensity that ultimately bring them together as unlikely partners. XPENDABLE is not neo-noir, but a more pure brand of the original recipe - a mixture of post WWII despair, cultural dissolution, and protagonists in the deepest of existential dilemmas, illustrated in expressionistic black-and-white in a way the old masters like John Alton and Ted McCord would have wanted it.
That Haussner expands on the story with a 30-minute narrative is not surprising; what is unexpected is his brilliant twist and embellishment on Hunter's theme. That curveball begins at 8:55 minutes into the film, with the arrival of Josephine Tilly, played by Annette Buchanan McGregor. Her simultaneously gravelly and sonorous voice provides a moral compass, as brutal as it may be, that gives XPENDABLE its ultimate and unsentimental depth. The connection between McGregor's Josephine and the film's main character, Frankie, played with authentic commitment by Preston Mead, lifts Xpendable into the stratosphere of film noir's richest themes of fatalism and disillusionment, where they bond over the wreckage of their mutually miserable lives, and embark on what we hope, against all odds, to be a road to redemption.
Technically, Haussner's jack-of-all-trades skills are on full display; trenchant dialogue, full-on chiaroscuro lighting, and a willingness to let his actors go, warts and all, on dueling monologues of unflinching emotional intensity that ultimately bring them together as unlikely partners. XPENDABLE is not neo-noir, but a more pure brand of the original recipe - a mixture of post WWII despair, cultural dissolution, and protagonists in the deepest of existential dilemmas, illustrated in expressionistic black-and-white in a way the old masters like John Alton and Ted McCord would have wanted it.