15 hours ago
5
This may prove the most curious item to hit screens all year: the latest in a run of microbudget calling-cards for hulking French martial artist Alan Delabie, who co-writes, co-directs, composes some of the incidental music, and would probably even do you a theme tune if it got him closer to the Expendables gig. Last year’s straight-to-streaming The Shepherd Code introduced Delabie’s Alex “the Shepherd” Lapierre – not the dutiful sheepherder that title conjures, but a hired assassin striving to go straight – with inevitable complications. Now it has generated a sequel, despite persisting with a look that more readily recalls home movies than those kickboxer flicks starring Don “the Dragon” Wilson (a guest star here) that went straight-to-VHS three decades ago.
The economics at play would seem haphazard at best. Some cash has been splashed on locations: the Shepherd is rejoined swerving his narky former colleagues in a lavish Portuguese villa with adjacent boating facilities, before clodhopping to Paris, Los Angeles and London (naturally introduced via filler footage of Tower Bridge) or their green-screen equivalents. Yet Delabie and co-writer/director/star Michael Morris fill every last one of these destinations with friends and associates who spend the ensuing vengeance saga mumbling and muttering. Between the copious dead air and abundant dead wood, we’re not so very far from a French-accented remake of Michael Flatley’s infamous Blackbird.
Prone to baleful off-camera stares as if waiting to pass an understirred protein shake, Delabie admittedly has some sort of screen presence, should we require a greying, vigorously tatted hybrid of Jean Reno and Gael García Bernal. Yet this script needed a few more leg days, while the film’s pacing negates any thick-ear-providing pleasures; it takes fully 30 minutes to approach anything like a fistfight, time filled by hapless exposition, randomly inserted flashbacks and placement for somebody’s wine label. The arrival of Shaina West belatedly raises the film’s pulse, wielding iron bars as a potential Shepherdess; points, too, for a left-field Frozen reference (“in the words of Elsa, you need to let that shit go”) – but like so much of this burly fumble, it’s not quite there.
