Brazen (2022)

User Review

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  d_riptide

  2 / 10

  I was going to say something snarky along the lines of “𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐳𝐞𝐧 isn’t as indefinitely brazen as it’s title and plot synopsis would lead you to believe” but honestly, the film practically sells itself out on that statement pretty quickly. It is so paper thin, I can’t even bother to finish that joke. ⁣
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  On the upside, the film sports decent production values. It's competently filmed with good framing, a nice color scheme, mostly fair editing and….passable sound design. That’s about the most slack I can cut with this.⁣
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  THIS is the culmination of a hundred such stories we have seen or read in the past twenty years with the tension rather flat and the climax rather underwhelming. Not even a few miles out, the bloody film doesn’t even try to hide who it’s culprit is and the best they could think of to distract us from said fact was to introduce a lot of fake suspense in a vein attempt to appeal to every TV demographic it could to make itself even more painfully formulaic. We have overly-deliberate reactions from one-dimensional cardboard cutouts, a soundtrack with abrupt musical interludes every few minutes, and a tale that boils down to a suspect with mommy issues with Alyssa Milano phoning it in and Sam Page giving off the impression he didn’t even want to be there. What also doesn’t help is that they essentially rush through the most interesting elements of what could’ve been an interesting story and plod out the rest of the filler at such a teeth-grindingly slow pace all at once.⁣
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  With a plot this linear and utterly surprise free, Monika Mitchell’s directing only perpetuates the hollow, lifeless, by-the-number procedure that comes and goes with an algorithm that constantly defines a complete lack of plausibility. The best it could’ve done, outside of switch around the obvious antagonist, was live up to how utterly campy and corny it’s unnatural dialogue sets in stone for the rest of the runtime and commit to being as self-aware and sordid as possible. Yet the initial whiplash between die hard crime tragedy and 90’s cheesebox soap opera is way too disjointed to either merge them together or fully break them apart.⁣
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  At best and at worst, this is a glorified try-not-to-laugh challenge that I won with ease. There is a lot of guilty pleasure entertainment to be had with this but not enough to make me recommend any of this.

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