Monday 4 August 2008

Tomorrow I Renege Appreciation

Tomorrow I Renege, along with the at times sublime circus-based film, I Fear None, was a late career rejoinder for dead action hero Dalton Trebeck.

I Fear None, which has gotten many a late appreciation, mainly due to the sudden fame of the auteurist darling Shaun Decassey, director that recent interminable foreign-language Oscar nominated, near-silent begging Buddhist bore The Sadness Of Oliver Sedare. This was a film worked following a failed suicide attempt on the set of I Fear None, after many a strange event during that filming. Yet while odd, with its many zombie images, the somnambulist Mr Trebeck images being excellent, I find it a tad pretentious. Tomorrow I Renege, from exiled junkie genius Warwick Jehane, really goes for all the pared down existential delights that Trebeck, with the right material, could muster.

Coming on like Speed meets Le Samurai, beginning with a brutal shoot-em-up through an airport terminal , Trebeck on one side, the sublime and also late Mr Dirk Michael Wheatley on the other, two men running to the side and firing at each other ungodly amounts of bullets. Men, women, children, old people all caught in the cross-fire, brutally gunned down, either between Trebeck and Wheatly or are in the background. Further madness ensues as Trebeck decides to hunt down Wheatley, which propels the rest of this marvellous, blood-soaked epic. Trebeck pummels Wheatley family members, dogs cats, little sister, transgendered grandfather in both Paris and LA, has emotive, very violent cat and mouse games, civilians garroted and sliced up by the dozen for making wrong turns, before Dalton seemingly kills his prey. This is half an hour in folks. Next jump two years, Trebeck undercover in Columbia, a heroin shipper with lots of gold around his neck, killing an innocent family at the start to prove his worth to a latino scumbag, an overweight Gabriel Van Dyke, portraying Jerry Perperson, best bud to our hero, his link to the outside world. Obviously Wheatley ain't dead, starts his own cat and mouse murderathon through undercover and stationed agents protecting Trebeck, Trebeck hitting back hard with vicious murders of his own, against his target's enemies, starting a drug war while he tracks down grinning crazy-eyed psycho Wheatley. Van Dyke escapes much escapes before being literally blown to pieces, as this middle section ends with a Scarface can s**k my d**k blowupathon, mega-massacre, which has flying midgets, kung fu fights on flying doors, hitmen with new-born babies strapped onto body as they shoots at Dalton, yelling wouldn‘t shoot a baby would you. Damn right he would. Dalton barely makes it out, disappears from his own people, getting ready for payback. Wheatley has stolen steals tons of drugs, disappears after making the target attack Trebeck at his own home base, is tracked to small-town America, leading to a stalking scene in a mall that leaves many dead, before Dalton tracks Wheatley through a forest, literally talking Wheatley apart limb from limb. Things could have gotten dodgy with the revelation that Dalton had stolen Wheatley's identity, smashed his face up years before, and Wheatley was in fact the agent but it all makes perfect sense in the context.

The plot synopsis tells you all you have to know about this sublime film. What does I Fear None have on this. Just some nice shots and zombie animals. Its good but not great. This if a film far more worthy of your time and a great example of the powerful emotions stirred by the late Dalton Trebeck and Dirk Michael Wheatley, not to mention the MIA genius Warwick Jehane. Come back sir. Cinema misses you.

No comments: