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Good Night to Die, A
Fox // R // April 20, 2004
List Price: $9.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
A Good Night to Die stars one-time British boxer Gary Stretch as Ronnie, a cool, collected hitman that's set up shop in New York City. The movie opens with Ronnie taking in a movie at a sparsely-populated theater when a boorish, obnoxious stranger takes a seat nearby and starts chatting him up. Dissatisfied with just gulping down his popcorn, August (Michael Rapaport) decides to help himself to Ronnie's wallet as well, whipping out a small knife and barking out expletive-laced orders. Ronnie responds by pulling out a pistol and aiming it squarely at August's head. Ronnie takes to August, though -- instead of killing him, Ronnie takes the argumentative, dimwitted thug under his wing. A few years pass. August is continually making messes of the underworld, and the much more talented and respected Ronnie is serving as his personal janitor. A couple gallons of alcohol and coincidentally poor fashion sense lead to August offing the wrong guy, and his mistake pits him against crime lord Madison. Despite advice from his wife (Robin Givens) and complete disinterest from August's seductive girlfriend (Penelope Fortier), Ronnie sets out to convince Madison to back off. Ronnie's attempts at protecting his friend culminate in a series of double-crosses and near-misses; when the wrong type of people are killed, there will be blood. Any movie with a pair of buddy hitmen who muse about seemingly random topics is unavoidably going to have Pulp Fiction used as a point of reference. Director Craig Singer and writer Robert Dean Klein certainly seem to be smitten with Tarantino, offering a similar visual flair along with some surface similarities to plotting, dialogue, and even casting. Many of the supporting players -- Debbie Harrie, Robin Givens, Ralph Macchio, Ally Sheedy, and Lainie Kazan -- have been mined from pop culture's past, much as Tarantino rescued the likes of John Travolta and Pam Grier from obscurity. A Good Night to Die also includes a turn by Frank Whaley, who had a small part in Pulp Fiction.
Some of the film's visual tricks are also reminiscent of Tarantino. Singer plays loosely with speed, such as intercutting between sped-up footage of the bustling city with the slowed-down actions of individuals. He toys with focus, zooms, and off-kilter angles, as well as replaying lines of dialogue from different takes and different angles. Although A Good Night to Die predates Kill Bill by a good while -- judging by the state of the New York skyline, at least some of the footage was shot before Fall 2001 -- it's almost prescient of what Tarantino would later accomplish. One brief fantasy sequence is shot in black and white, and similar to the anime in Kill Bill, an extended flashback is acted out using creepy puppets and stop-motion animation. A Good Night to Die also incorporates some of Tarantino's quirkiness. When debating whether or not escalators have had the same damning effect on the West as elevators, Ronnie and August's discussion propels them onto an escalator, reappearing in a drab bedroom a handful of sentences later. One shootout takes place in a penthouse teeming with caged chickens, and Ronnie showcases his lucrative skills by offing a senator in mid-blowjob from a nearby rooftop. The movie doesn't deftly intermingle humor and pop culture references as well as Tarantino, though: nods to The Godfather and the Commodores are a little too obvious and seem shoehorned in, and rants about elevators and varying eras of Van Halen aren't nearly as eminently quotable.
My biggest problem was with the movie's structure. Tarantino is able to effectively juggle a large number of characters and subplots, managing to make each and every one of them feel essential. That's unfortunately not the case here. I liked the movie with August and Ronnie, and my interest waned whenever the focus veered too far away from them. If the scenes between Ronnie and Paige could have been excised entirely, the movie wouldn't have played much differently. They provide little character advancement, just continual reiteration of "August's my pal" that's hammered so relentlessly into the ground that it's pretty much unambiguous by that point. Donnie and Marie, a pair of hitmen that may be siblings or may be lovers, are completely inconsequential, seeming less like supporting characters and more like filler present only to push the runtime past the 90 minute mark. New faces are introduced and almost immediately forgotten, disregarding Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters. If A Good Night to Die had either disposed of these insignificant side characters or given them some greater importance, this would be a much more positive review. As it is, visual flair and a pair of likeable leads aren't enough to warrant forking over a credit card, though fans of the quirk-crime subgenre may opt for a rental. Video: A Good Night to Die is presented full-frame, though the compositions give me the impression that it was intended to be matted at 1.85:1. Despite the largely empty space at the top and bottom for much of the film, the lack of proper matting doesn't have much of an impact. The DVD looks decent enough, appearing fairly sharp with respectably inky blacks. The source material is clean, with no speckling or print flaws of note, and there were no apparent compression or authoring flaws either. An anamorphic widescreen presentation would obviously have been greatly preferred, but the quality of what's provided here is passable enough, at least for a rental. I still have no idea why Key DVD is so dead-set against presenting movies in their original aspect ratio.
Audio: The Dolby stereo surround track, encoded at a bitrate of 192Kbps, sounds better than average. Its dialogue comes through well, with the exception of one scene set in a graveyard which presumably has more to do with the way the audio was recorded on the set than anything specific to this DVD. Surrounds are frequently buzzing with activity, used often and to great effect, most memorably during a near-hallucinatory scene in which Ronnie is surrounded by haunting voices. There isn't much going on in the lower frequencies, but there isn't much call for it either. It's also worth noting that the movie's soundtrack was entirely scored by New York indie rockers Bee and Flower. The disc's other audio options include a stereo surround dub in Spanish and closed captions.
Supplements: As seems to be standard for Key DVD's output, A Good Night to Die's extras are limited to a full-frame trailer, running around two minutes in length. The disc's static menus are presented at the same ratio, and there are twenty-four chapter stops in total.
Conclusion: A Good Night to Die -- an okay disc to rent. Despite debuting on DVD under the $10 mark, the lack of extras, limited replay value, and modified aspect ratio leave it better suited for a rental.
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