All Rise...

Judge Patrick Bromley is all muscle.

The Charge

You owe. You pay.

The Case

The revenge movie is one of my favorite subgenres. I don't know if it's the satisfaction of seeing violent street justice dished out against horrible people or if it's my own unslakable blood lust, but I'll watch just about any revenge movie you put in front of me and probably have an ok time with it. This bias goes a long way towards explaining why I was able to see the good in even this year's American Muscle, a generic revenge movie that tries its damnedest to resemble a whole bunch of exploitation movies of the past. It's yet another deliberate "grindhouse" copy—an exercise in style that mostly ignores content. It's an air quote movie.

Nick Principe (Madison County) stars as John Falcon, a badass tattooed criminal who is double-crossed by his brother (Todd Farmer, My Bloody Valentine 3D) and wife (Robin Sydney, Masters of Horror: Right to Die) after they pull a job. He goes to prison for 10 years and comes out with just one thing on his mind: getting even.

That's the very simple setup for American Muscle, a movie that wants to do a lot with a little but ends up only doing a little. It's a competent enough low-budget exercise, and I know from hearing producer Travis Stevens talk about the film that the intention was to take a cheap grindhouse movie and really treat it like a beautiful art film. Director Ravi Dhar, making his feature debut, only partially succeeds. It meets the limited demands of the genre with style and energy and stacks the deck with a couple of genre ringers. As a fan of independent horror, it was fun to see screenwriter and sometimes-actor Todd Farmer step into the villain role. Troma star-turned-screenwriter Trent Haaga (who wrote this year's excellent Cheap Thrills) shows up as a henchman. Full Moon Features starlet Robin Sydney is incredibly sexy and almost entirely naked through the film. There are reasons to recommend it is what I'm saying.

But some of those reasons are also its biggest setbacks. I understand that screenwriter John Fallon set out to write a very specific kind of movie—one in which the men are tough and the women are sexy and everyone leads a violent life. But because it's all so calculated, there's something ugly about it. Every single female character in the movie exists to throw themselves at some man (usually Principe, who beds three of the four women in the movie—two of them immediately upon meeting them) with sex that feels angry towards women. The one major female character in the film is a double-crossing thief, murderer in drug addict who lies around in nearly nothing and has sex with every single person near hear, man or woman. I recognize that these movies aren't meant to be watched politically, but there's just something repellent about a movie that's this misogynist—even a deliberate genre exploitation movie. It reminded me of Larry Bishop's Hell Ride from a few years ago, a movie that managed to be bad in a lot of the same ways as American Muscle. I can handle a movie that's ugly and nasty and has a dark worldview, but it's 2014, guys. Let's try to do better.

Well Go USA's Blu-ray of American Muscle gets the job done. The 1.78:1-framed film gets a full 1080p HD transfer that looks very bright and clean—probably too bright and clean. A movie like this needs to look beat up and worn (though thankfully they avoided any of that fake print damage done digitally after the fact). There's a good amount of detail visible and solid color balance, though HD isn't very forgiving of the special effects and CGI blood sprays. The lossless 5.1 surround track keeps the dialogue intelligible while filling in the rear and side channels with loud roaring engines, gunshots a plenty and the occasional piece of score that's mixed loud enough to keep you riding the remote. The only extras included are the film's trailer and a commentary track with producer Stevens and director Rhavi Dhar. It's an interesting conversation about their intentions and the challenges of doing this kind of film on an extremely limited budget.

Before anyone accuses me of being too hard on American Muscle, let me once again reiterate that I am the audience for this movie. I love revenge movies. I like the cast. I like low-budget action and exploitation movies. The movie does some things right, but it's never able to transcend just a handful of elements that work, mostly going in circles and never overcoming its own rotten core. It's no worse than the average DTV action movie you'd blindly rent at a Redbox, but the pieces are here for something more.

The Verdict

Too bad.

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