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It promises to reveal the transformation of a deeply flawed and tormented character but reaches that conclusion by sacrificing credibility and coherence. By the time title character Lou Benedetti (Bret Carr) reaches his epiphany, it’s perplexing to figure out how he reached it and difficult to feel any enthusiasm.

In addition to starring in the film, Carr directed the film, co-wrote the script, worked as a producer and even provided some music to the soundtrack. Apparently, all of this multitasking has taken its toll because all of these components suffer in the finished movie.

As a director, Carr has no sense of pacing (76 minutes seems like an eternity) and doesn’t know when to tell Bret Carr the actor that his performance isn’t working in a given scene. Carr’s crying sequences look about as fake as a purple toupee.

The thin story concerns Lou’s faltering career as a boxer and his stammering problem. After almost getting title shot (hey, he coulda been a contendah), Lou discovers that his head can no longer take punches.

His crooked manager (Ernest Mingione) wants him to box on the bare knuckle underground circuit, and his girlfriend (Suzanne Didonna) wants him to get lost.

It seems the stuttering is the least of Lou’s problems. His girlfriend gets a little upset when he presents her with an anatomically correct vibrator and expresses her outrage by throwing a battery at him. This knocks Lou to the ground.

So that doesn’t make much sense to you either?

As he wanders through his personal abyss, Lou takes a pretentious acting/motivational speaking class and ends up getting helped by a former student named Starla (Starla Benford).

The philosophy that she and other characters recite sounds like Tommy Chong, after using a few too many of his trademark bongs, interchangeably reciting the works of Sigmund Freud, Norman Vincent Peale and David Mamet. Here are some choice lines that were actually uttered during the film:
*”Life isn’t happening to us; it’s happening for us.”
*”War is the biggest homosexual experience in the world.”
*”You’re in the prime of your life, but you look like syphilis dripping from a john’s cock.”

Believe it or not, some of those lines might have actually been penned by co-screenwriter Quinn K Redeker, who’s best know for contributing to the script for “The Deer Hunter.”

If the dialogue weren’t jumbled on its own, Carr loads the film with garbled flashbacks and sticks in pointless cameos by Wes Anderson veteran Kumar Pallana and Burt Young from “Rocky.”

As you can imagine, Lou loves “Rocky,” and one of the earlier titles of this film was “2 Birds with 1 Stallone.” Apparently the only reason Young is in the film is that Stallone had better things to do, like “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over.”

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14491&reviewer=382
originally posted: 04/28/06 23:07:33
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