Reviews

This was the release that finally convinced me to try out Daily Wire+. From the trailer, I figured I might get a few laughs but the majority of the narrative would focus on getting the moral message across.

Nope, I was wrong. Lady Ballers pretty much assumes you already know why the situation is messed up and, for 95% of the runtime, dedicates itself to just being entertainment. There are zero grand speeches about protecting the legitimacy of women's sports (though comments are made in passing), no moral grandstanding, no soapbox moments calling out damages done by ideology, there isn't even a magical resolution where the sanctity of the sport is upheld in this fictional alternate universe. Main character learns a lesson and improves himself, and that's it.

And I think that's all it needs to be. It was genuinely funny throughout, and I laughed far more than I'd assumed I would. The comedic timing was much better than I'd anticipated and the cast was game, the pacing and the script were solid. It's not an instant classic. Just a really good comedy.

Paul, a serial killer with one facial expression, offs a Lyft/Uber-style driver and takes his place, then starts killing the fares that irritate him. Meanwhile Jasmine, an attractive woman, and her prick boyfriend are on the outs. These characters will run into each other multiple times throughout one night. That's the general story. It's not great, and there are no real surprises. Very nice full frontal nudity in the first ten minutes. Film is boring in long stretches and mildly entertaining in short bursts. I don't recommend it. That's it. Now onto why I wanted to write this review.

This film is not worthy of the sevens, eights and nines it received early on, but this barrage of one-star reviews in the wake of that prompted me to write my own review and submit my own rating.

First of all, to address the one-star reviews, note how none of them give any real specifics. They just list off random aspects of the film (cinematography, music, acting, audio, editing, writing), tell you they suck without saying why, and then end the review there. For the most part, this is untrue.

CINEMATOGRAPHY- This is a driving movie on a budget, so there's going to be a lot of shots of cars driving through the city. There is, in fact, WAY too many of these shots for the threadbare story, and too much time is dedicated to this. I'll agree with that, absolutely. But the shots themselves are varied and decent (multiple interior angles, tilted angles on skyscrapers through the windshield, side angles on deserted city streets, exterior roof, trunk, wheel and bumper angles, not bad), and the lighting is above-average for a low-budget thriller. You can always tell what's going on, and where the action is taking place. When the action is outside of vehicles, the camerawork is standard VOD fare with a couple inspired moments (like the wordless interaction between the chick in the coffee shop and Paul).

MUSIC- The music is not "horrendous", but it is largely forgettable. There's a bizarre warbling of high and low-note strings after a murder at about 46 minutes that I really enjoyed, but that lasted no more than twenty seconds, and soon after there's a montage at fifty-two minutes in set to Marc Wulf's 'Eclipse', which was nice, and would've been nicer if anything remotely interesting was happening on-screen. Music never hurt my ears, but yeah, most of it is a mix of drums and electronic background ambiance.

ACTING- Nobody here is going to win any awards. There's a hot dog vendor at the second time Paul meets Jasmine and the prick, and the hot dog vendor is, I'm not joking, the most relaxed and believable performer in the film. He's great. He's got two lines, I think, but I absolutely believed that was a hot dog vendor. So kudos to him. Everyone else ranges from serviceable (the leads are okay, nothing special but not "cringeworthy" either) to bordering on painful (Paul's first victim, the girl at the bar, she was pretty awful. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad she was in the movie, just, y'know, not for her acting). If you want to include Double-T in the painful category, I won't fight you; personally though, I found him an amusing highlight. So overall, I think it's a mixed bag leveling out at mediocre.

PACING- It sucks. No defense. That hot dog vendor scene I mentioned, where Paul meets Jasmine and the prick for only the SECOND time? It occurs over halfway through the film. These are the film's main protagonists and antagonist, and they're only meeting up again for the second time at around fifty minutes. The pacing is awful.

EDITING- Decent. To be fair, this is another point where I have to say it's slightly above-average for a straight-to-VOD. You can always tell what's happening, the murder scenes are rarely satisfying but you don't get lost in the action and the editing does what it's supposed to. It tells the story in a coherent fashion and keeps the tempo of the action sequences at a faster rate than the hunting scenes. It's nothing amazing, but it was better than I'd expect from this budget tier.

WRITING- Yeah, it's bad. If you rate films one star based on writing alone, fine. This would be maybe a two or a three. No higher than a three. The characters are shallow, nobody except Double-T and Carl, the original driver, had anything interesting to say and I didn't care about anyone. I actually wanted the killer to get the girl in the end, but that's my own thing, and not really due to the writing beyond how much of a prick they made Jasmine's boyfriend out to be. So the script is bottom-tier, but there's more to a film than that.

OVERALL- So I rated this film a six before writing all this down, but in the writing of this review I've lowered it to a five. There are some serious low points to this movie, none more-so than the awful, goes-nowhere plot and script that squanders the potential of an 'Uber-based thriller'. But ultimately, it's just average for direct-to-streaming films. There are some pretty nice moments in the filmmaking, and most of it is just middling. Hopefully I've detailed, with examples, enough to explain why this isn't a one-star film or a nine-star near masterpiece.

FINAL NITPICKS-

"Oh, I'll just tell you where to go."

No, no you won't. That's not how driving apps work. Lyft and Uber both operate by the passenger requesting a pickup point and a destination, so that the operator knows whether or not they want to accept that passenger BEFORE picking them up. And yet, annoyingly, over half the passengers in this movie, the killer included, just offers to give directions instead. And they offer cash, which is also not accepted in reality. These are nitpicks, but they irritated me throughout the film.

And you can't punch someone's head off just because you're wearing brass knuckles. Give me a break.

Eventually, at some friggin' point, a squad leader is going to listen to the on-site resident expert when they tell him to pull his men out of there before they get slaughtered. It may not be this movie, or the next fifteen of them, but one day, I tell ya...

One of the great things about werewolf movies, by and large, is their willingness to go dark. The Ginger Snaps trilogy, Dog Soldiers, An American Werewolf in London; these films refuse to follow the Hollywood horror trope of guy meets monster, guy kills monster, guy walks off into sunrise with hot girl. Wer, for whatever faults in may have, is another movie with cajones enough to add to that list. It's dark, beginning with a family on a camping trip being attacked by a werewolf, and it gets progressively darker from there.

The storyline follows an attorney named Kate (A.J. Cook, unrecognizable to me from her lead in Final Destination 2) as she attempts to defend Talan Gwynek, a tall, quiet brute of a man accused of the horrific crime in the opening, as well as her defense team's investigation into why they believe the police force are incarcerating the man. This initial premise kind of gets tossed out the window as the bodies start piling up, though, and once they do the remainder is a pretty straight-forward affair of find beast, kill beast, don't get killed by beast. There are some twists in the proceedings that you may not see coming, but for the most part the film gives you the moments you'd expect.

The pacing is brisk, which is nice, but we're not really given enough information or time to care about anyone all that much. Kate and her associate Gavin, an English doctor with a PhD in wildlife forensics, had a relationship at one point that's causing some friction, but it never develops into much. Eric, her aide, (played very well by Vik Sahay, giving more to the role than the script gave him) doesn't like Gavin, and Gavin doesn't like him, but this never develops. Captain Klaus Pistor, the... chief investigator(?), may have ulterior motives involving a land grab for incarcerating Talan, but, you guessed it, this never becomes much, though he is at least portrayed by the always dependable Sebastian Roché, he of television villainy. The only bit of sympathy I felt for anyone was for Talan, whom Brian Scott O'Connor gives a bit of pathos. It should be noted that no one in the cast embarrasses the film; everyone is game.

The film is shot cinéma vérité, like The Shield, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development. It's as if there's a documentary crew following everyone without regard for their own lives, to bring this footage to light. It works for the film for the most part and adds an air of realism to the events; I'm thankful they didn't go for found-footage or we'd have to add werewolves to the pile effected by that nauseating genre. It also means that the soundtrack, which can get overbearing in its attempts to convince you you're feeling tense (I'm not movie; I don't have much invested in the life of random police officer number 32) occasionally does more to harm the film than help it.

Despite its flaws, Wer is a respectable addition to the werewolf genre. The special effects are good, occasionally very good, and the CGI is understated, only there to aid the cosmetics and the bloodletting. The gore is brief but is graphic enough that it should satiate fans, and the violence is pretty brutal at points. I can't remember the last time I saw a little old lady get pummeled about the face with that much ferocity.

Wer is a solid 7/10. It doesn't aim for classic, but it does what it does with an admirable amount of style and relish.