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Trouble Bound
Artisan // R // February 18, 2003
List Price: $14.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Shortly after getting out of the clink, Harry (Michael Madsen) found his luck quickly improving, netting five thousand bucks and a Lincoln convertible in a single night of Poker. As he hops in his newly-acquired ride to turn his winnings into a small fortune, Harry tells his buddies that he has every intention of staying out of trouble, apparently unaware that he's a character in a movie appropriately titled Trouble Bound. The Lincoln has a corpse rotting in the trunk, and the badniks responsible for the murder are hot on Harry's trail, in search of a key that separates them from sinfully large piles of cash. In the meantime, Harry picks up Kit (Patricia Arquette), the vengeful granddaughter of a murdered Mafioso, and the two travel to Sin City together. Her thirst for blood has Mafia mad dogs nipping at her and Harry's heels as they're relentlessly pursued from all directions.
1993's Trouble Bound may have been inspired at least in part by the success of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, including its starring turn by Michael Madsen. The movie offers a similar mix of action and light-hearted quips, though not remotely as effectively on either front. Trouble Bound doesn't get nearly as gruesome with the violence, and the comedic moments are more overtly goofy. Instead of extended discussions of the virtues of tipping and Madonna's creative output, we're treated with offhand, quickly forgotten musings like "What would America do without its porn movies and rat-trap hotels?" Trouble Bound is the kind of flick where each unfunny one-liner is followed by a lingering shot of the actor smirking, apparently under the mistaken impression that the movie is far wittier than it actually is. Other examples of hee-larity involve a bar fight because of a second-hand "your mama's so fat..." joke, Patricia Arquette doing a fourth-grade-quality impression of a drunk, Kit's stab at a Southern Belle accent, and even conversations with dead people. There's also the tried-and-true cliché of a driver careening off the road when distracted by his female passenger's exposed leg.
Trouble Bound passes itself off as an action movie, but these sorts of sequences are few and far between. The movie drags along at such a leisurely pace for its first forty-five minutes that the meager payoffs that follow aren't worth it. Every bit of restraint I could muster was required to resist whacking the "Skip Chapter" button on my remote while I waited impatiently for something to happen. The acting, despite the number of movies under its leads' belts at the time, feels more like amateur night at a dinner theater than an actual feature film. There isn't the slightest spark between Madsen and Arquette, and their performances are unbearably limp and lifeless. I couldn't help but wince whenever the screenplay called for Kit to exhibit anything approximating emotion, and her snitty tiffs with Harry are particularly embarrassing. Since their relationship is the crux of the movie, its complete and total failure is a fatal blow.
Visually, Trouble Bound is decent enough. This isn't too overwhelming a shock considering the presence of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, whose collaborations with Steven Spielberg have netted him three Academy Award nominations and a pair of Oscars, among innumerable other nods. Given the path director Jeffrey Reiner's career took afterwards, including Columbo TV movies, episodes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and the thrice-damned The Real World Movie: The Lost Season, it seems fairly evident in whom the bulk of the talent lies.
Trouble Bound is a pretty dismal movie in most every respect, and I can't muster much more enthusiasm for its lackluster release on DVD.
Video: The packaging for Trouble Bound claims that the movie has been "formatted from its original version to fit your screen" as well as "presented in the original 1.33:1 format". Of those two conflicting statements, the latter would seem to be correct. The movie doesn't appear cramped or marred by an excessive amount of dead space at the top and bottom of the screen. Trouble Bound looks very comfortable in the 1.33:1 frame, particularly in the tighter shots in the Lincoln. Grain is pervasive throughout, and the image is sorely lacking in fine detail. The source material is lightly speckled, and the disc seems to have somewhat of a rough time correctly displaying certain images and patterns, such as a pair of polka-dotted pants of Kit's around thirty-eight minutes in. The presentation is virtually indistinguishable from a broadcast on cable.
Audio: Trouble Bound features an unremarkable Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. The rears frequently chirp with activity, primarily to reinforce the score by Vinny Golia along with a couple of scattered directional effects. The music is accompanied by enough bass to leak through to my subwoofer and provide a very modest low-end kick, though there's nothing that rattled the walls or stood out as particularly memorable. Gunshots, for whatever reason, sound flat, lacking any strength in the lower frequencies. Dialogue has a shrill, slightly grating AM-radio quality to it, and since the dialogue is painful enough to listen to as it is, that doesn't really work to the movie's benefit.
No subtitles or alternate soundtracks have been included with this DVD release, but it does feature closed captions for the hearing impaired.
Supplements: There isn't anything at all in the way of genuine supplemental material on this DVD, unless you count special features like "interactive menus", "scene selections", and "digitally mastered". The disc sports a set of static 4x3 menus and twelve chapter stops.
Conclusion: Trouble Bound, which is available online for under ten dollars shipped, might be worth fishing out of the bargain bin for viewers who can't resist the temptation to have a cable-quality presentation of it archived on a shiny five-inch platter. There's nothing about the DVD or the movie featured on it that inspires any sort of enthusiastic recommendation. Despite the comparatively low asking price, I'd suggest keeping an eye on cable listings if the premise sounds appealing. At best, Trouble Bound might be worth a rental for fans of the talent involved, but I would absolutely not recommend it as a purchase sight-unseen. Skip It.
1993's Trouble Bound may have been inspired at least in part by the success of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, including its starring turn by Michael Madsen. The movie offers a similar mix of action and light-hearted quips, though not remotely as effectively on either front. Trouble Bound doesn't get nearly as gruesome with the violence, and the comedic moments are more overtly goofy. Instead of extended discussions of the virtues of tipping and Madonna's creative output, we're treated with offhand, quickly forgotten musings like "What would America do without its porn movies and rat-trap hotels?" Trouble Bound is the kind of flick where each unfunny one-liner is followed by a lingering shot of the actor smirking, apparently under the mistaken impression that the movie is far wittier than it actually is. Other examples of hee-larity involve a bar fight because of a second-hand "your mama's so fat..." joke, Patricia Arquette doing a fourth-grade-quality impression of a drunk, Kit's stab at a Southern Belle accent, and even conversations with dead people. There's also the tried-and-true cliché of a driver careening off the road when distracted by his female passenger's exposed leg.
Trouble Bound passes itself off as an action movie, but these sorts of sequences are few and far between. The movie drags along at such a leisurely pace for its first forty-five minutes that the meager payoffs that follow aren't worth it. Every bit of restraint I could muster was required to resist whacking the "Skip Chapter" button on my remote while I waited impatiently for something to happen. The acting, despite the number of movies under its leads' belts at the time, feels more like amateur night at a dinner theater than an actual feature film. There isn't the slightest spark between Madsen and Arquette, and their performances are unbearably limp and lifeless. I couldn't help but wince whenever the screenplay called for Kit to exhibit anything approximating emotion, and her snitty tiffs with Harry are particularly embarrassing. Since their relationship is the crux of the movie, its complete and total failure is a fatal blow.
Visually, Trouble Bound is decent enough. This isn't too overwhelming a shock considering the presence of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, whose collaborations with Steven Spielberg have netted him three Academy Award nominations and a pair of Oscars, among innumerable other nods. Given the path director Jeffrey Reiner's career took afterwards, including Columbo TV movies, episodes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and the thrice-damned The Real World Movie: The Lost Season, it seems fairly evident in whom the bulk of the talent lies.
Trouble Bound is a pretty dismal movie in most every respect, and I can't muster much more enthusiasm for its lackluster release on DVD.
Video: The packaging for Trouble Bound claims that the movie has been "formatted from its original version to fit your screen" as well as "presented in the original 1.33:1 format". Of those two conflicting statements, the latter would seem to be correct. The movie doesn't appear cramped or marred by an excessive amount of dead space at the top and bottom of the screen. Trouble Bound looks very comfortable in the 1.33:1 frame, particularly in the tighter shots in the Lincoln. Grain is pervasive throughout, and the image is sorely lacking in fine detail. The source material is lightly speckled, and the disc seems to have somewhat of a rough time correctly displaying certain images and patterns, such as a pair of polka-dotted pants of Kit's around thirty-eight minutes in. The presentation is virtually indistinguishable from a broadcast on cable.
Audio: Trouble Bound features an unremarkable Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. The rears frequently chirp with activity, primarily to reinforce the score by Vinny Golia along with a couple of scattered directional effects. The music is accompanied by enough bass to leak through to my subwoofer and provide a very modest low-end kick, though there's nothing that rattled the walls or stood out as particularly memorable. Gunshots, for whatever reason, sound flat, lacking any strength in the lower frequencies. Dialogue has a shrill, slightly grating AM-radio quality to it, and since the dialogue is painful enough to listen to as it is, that doesn't really work to the movie's benefit.
No subtitles or alternate soundtracks have been included with this DVD release, but it does feature closed captions for the hearing impaired.
Supplements: There isn't anything at all in the way of genuine supplemental material on this DVD, unless you count special features like "interactive menus", "scene selections", and "digitally mastered". The disc sports a set of static 4x3 menus and twelve chapter stops.
Conclusion: Trouble Bound, which is available online for under ten dollars shipped, might be worth fishing out of the bargain bin for viewers who can't resist the temptation to have a cable-quality presentation of it archived on a shiny five-inch platter. There's nothing about the DVD or the movie featured on it that inspires any sort of enthusiastic recommendation. Despite the comparatively low asking price, I'd suggest keeping an eye on cable listings if the premise sounds appealing. At best, Trouble Bound might be worth a rental for fans of the talent involved, but I would absolutely not recommend it as a purchase sight-unseen. Skip It.
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