The soon to be
produced independent feature 'Assassins' started life as director Michael Bonomo’s eighth short film and is
his sixth to be released. It has been met with critical acclaim
since doing the rounds on the festival circuit last year.
The project came about due to the good
fortune of good timing with the filmmaker’s first meeting with the hugely
talented character actor Bill Oberst Jr. at a networking event a year prior to the
writing of the script. Bonomo had seen Oberst Jr.’s turn in ‘Dismal’
(2009) and impressed with his performance in that piece of B movie schlock and
his meeting with the man wrote for him the role of the short’s veteran
professional assassin Nathan. Their collaborative effort made for easier
progression towards pre-production but due to Bill Oberst Jr.’s busy schedule
it made the shoot very tight with just a day to film all of his scenes that
made up almost the entire 9-minutes of the piece. This is Michael Bonomo’s first
attempt at telling a dialogue driven story. This is a challenge he deliberately
set himself to stretch his filmmaking talents as his previous short works told
their narratives through the expressions of images with minimal lines spoken or
with no dialogue at all as in Unsaid. You can watch the short film version of 'Assassins' at
the end of this review.
‘Assassins’ tells the tale of a meeting one
night between the said seasoned hitman Nathan (Oberst Jr.) and a newcomer to
the profession Walter (Vincente DiSanti) set during the immediate aftermath of
his first assignment taking place in the apartment of the young woman who was
his victim. The meeting is fated not to end well for one of them.
As the opening credits appear against a black
screen, we hear the nocturnal sound of crickets accompanied by the sounds of distant on-going
traffic and a helicopter flying by establishing the night setting. Fading in
after the title card the first shot of the film is an extreme close-up of the
right side of Nathan’s face. As he looks down the camera goes to a shot of a
digital clock on a car’s dashboard. As the time turns to precisely 8:00 pm, the
camera goes back to its original position and Nathan coolly says to himself “Times
up”. With that, he gets out of his car and makes his way up the steps of
the apartment building and through its entrance.
We now cut to a shot of a
handgun on the seat of a toilet and we are then introduced to Walter (DiSanti) sitting
down on the floor of the bathroom of the woman’s apartment. This is inter-cut with
the action of Nathan opening the front door walking slowly through the living
room and into the kitchen and calmly fixing himself a glass of water. This is
when Walter hears the presence of someone else as the tap on the sink is turned
off putting his ear to the bathroom door just as Nathan takes off his jacket
and sits down at the kitchen table facing the window with his back to the rest of
the kitchen waiting for Walter to come out. With gun in hand, Walter creeps up
behind Nathan and as soon as he gets close to him, he points his gun to the
back of his head taking off the safety and all Nathan does is lift up his glass
and takes a sip of his water. Thus begins his monologue.
The dialogue Bonomo has written for his lead
is of a noirish quality. Bill Oberst Jr. delivers it with assured confidence as
his character Nathan explains his reciprocal
notion of a young man losing his virginity with a woman in imperfect fashion in
an effort to become a man in relation to the novice assassin Walter’s first hit
that has gone horribly wrong. This is a life lesson for the newbie triggerman who
may have made a wrong career decision in the teaching that a gun does not give
a man power and that the power comes from how the man controls the gun. Supplementing
this are flashbacks of Walter’s killing of the woman seamlessly integrated with
Oberst Jr.’s chillingly imposing performance. He commands every
scene with his domineering presence with supreme conviction as a cold weary man
that belongs to a different world - a dark side of life - someone who has been
there done that and seen it all with nothing surprising him as this world is
normal to him.
The torturous psychological aspects
are presented thick, strong with pitch-perfect execution from both the
director’s tightly controlled pacing, and right on the mark moments of timing
aided by the efficient editing by Heather Goodwin and the two players’ chemistry
who bounce off each other very well. All this combines to make for tense taut
viewing. The enhancement of the atmosphere is provided by the highly attractive
cinematography by Noel Maitland with some truly inspired shots and angles on a 16:9 widescreen format and an effectively subtle musical score by Kristen Baum whose
previous credits include ‘The Uninvited’ (2009), ‘The Book of Eli’ (2010) and ‘Priest’
(2011).
The production values are very high on such a low-budget and an equally
limited shooting schedule making it one helluva of an achievement that it turned
out to be this slick. With the feature film version going into production this
August with a screenplay by David Grant the writer of the genre site Films That Witness Madness that promises to delve deeper into the character of Nathan and will entail a deadly game of cat-and-mouse just imagine what all this combined talent can pull off with
more resources at their disposal.
You can watch ‘Assassins’ here…
For more information and regular updates on the production of the feature length ‘Assassins’ and to watch the rest of his work visit Michael Bonomo’s official website.
*** out of ****
Dave J. Wilson
©2012
Cinematic Shocks, Dave J. Wilson - All work is the property of the credited
author and may not be reprinted or reproduced elsewhere without permission.
No comments:
Post a comment