>>REVIEW
RISE: BLOOD HUNTER
STARRING Lucy Liu and Robert Forester
DIRECTED BY Sebastian Gutierrez
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Snakes on a Plane scribe, Sebastian Gutierrez, opts (unfortunately) for the director’s chair with his latest script, Rise: Blood Hunter – a muddled contribution to the vigilante vampire genre.
While Snakes’s campy premise and self-aware direction sat well with the escapism-hungry crowds of summer, Rise, with its pseudo-gothic script and shoddy production values, shamelessly asks to be taken seriously, and, in so doing, sets itself up for a mighty hard fall.
Along for the fall is Lucy Liu who, I rationalize, signed on to the project before actually reading the script. Liu plays Sadie Blake, a journalist who wakes up entombed in the city morgue, sporting nothing but a gashed throat and toe-tag. Upon discovering her immortal ways, Blake sets out, armed with a puny crossbow, to slay all those responsible for her injustice/death. A small parade of brazenly one-dimensional characters then enters and exits the picture, existing only for the convenience of a narrative so underdeveloped it’s insulting.
There’s a bit of an ironic twist in that the film’s obvious budgetary restrictions inadvertently produce its most innovative concept – vampires who possess none of the superhuman qualities (with the exception of immortality) so often attributed to them. Unfortunately, Gutierrez’s script refuses to embrace its low-budget roots and ignores completely the analogous potential of having these inherently selfish beings so closely removed from humans.
Instead, we’re offered a sloppy story derived from bigger (and better) films but lacking the effects, choreography and storytelling to adequately emulate them. A desperate editing room decision to break the linear narrative (by using an irrelevant sequence from the middle to open the film) is entirely superfluous and only highlights a lack of confidence in the source material.
Genre enthusiasts will be dismayed by the absence of any real insight into the world of vampirism – the rest of us will hate it for everything else. |
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