This movie is kind of difficult to rate. In one sense it is the kind of hardboiled private investigator taking no shit and dishing out his own kind of justice that I like. However it is also, at times, a really silly movie with rather a silly script and a main character that takes a ludicrous amount of beating and still pops up and kicks ass.
In the end I decided that I did indeed like this movie. I liked its rather “noir” atmosphere and the fact that the character indeed is tough as nails and kicks some serious ass. There is plenty of action in the movie and it is quite violent and sometimes a bit silly but it fits the movie and I think this particular movie would be less to my liking without it.
There are some interesting bad guys in the movie as well. There are of course the basic thugs which are disposed of rather quickly but there is the lollypop girl which is adding a bit of flavor, there is the big black guy which is really not so much a bad guy but a worthy adversary of Malone and then there is the totally whacko pyromaniac, Matchstick. This guy is insanely scary. I quite liked him, not as a person of course but as an element of the movie.
The story is sometimes as whacko as some of the characters in the movie so do not expect a good mystery or even a coherent story out of this movie. Sure it has a red thread going through it and there is an explanation at the end but sometimes what the characters do and how we get from start to finish seems rather ad-hoc to me. Still, the overall wackiness of all the various elements of this movie combines to something that I did indeed like.
The end was a wee bit disappointing though. Sometimes, when watching a movie, it is clear that there was an intention to produce a sequel but end a feature movie with a “To be continued…” text is really stupid unless you already have a signed contract for the sequel. Luckily the actual story is brought to a good enough conclusion and it is just a few of Malone’s personal loose ends left at the end of the movie.
