Electric Slide

May 4, 2016

In Home, Review by Cara NashLeave a Comment

"...never gives you anything substantial."
John Noonan
Year: 2014
Rating: M
Director: Tristan Patterson
Cast:

Jim Sturgess, Isabel Lucas, Chloe Sevigny, Patricia Arquette

Distributor: Eagle
Format:
DVD
Released: Available now
Running Time: 91 minutes
Worth: 2 Discs

FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

…never gives you anything substantial.

In 1983, furniture store owner, Eddie Dodson, robbed over 60 banks in the space of nine months. Six in a single day. After doing time for his crimes, he ended up working for Jack Nicholson before robbing some more banks and eventually dying of liver failure related to hepatitis C. It was, to be fair, a busy life. Electric Slide, directed by Tristan Patterson, focusses on that year in ‘83 when he would become the gentleman bank robber.

Glossing over his well-known drug addiction, the movie Dodson (Jim Sturgess) must get money together when Christopher Lambert’s mob boss threatens to break his legs. During his crime sprees, Dodson picks up Pauline (Isabel Lucas), a waif who appears to have been blown into LA in the last breeze. She’s enamoured with Eddie, and clearly finds his new career path something of a turn-on. It’s a shame then that this central romance is uninvolving, no matter how many LA punk songs the soundtrack plays during their love scenes.

And that’s the problem with Electric Slide as a whole. It emotes all over the place, but never gives you anything substantial. It’s a glossy and slick affair, that occasionally reminds the audience of Scorsese in his youth, but that’s not enough. Like Dodson’s fake bravado in the face of adversity, or his flirtations with the cashiers that he robs, it all rings hollow. We come in knowing little about Dodson and leave perhaps knowing even less. Take the film as a fairy tale with Dodson as his own unreliable narrator, and the vapidity of it all begins to make sense. It would certainly justify why every woman, including Patricia Arquette and Chloe Sevigny, who meets Dodson wants to sleep with him upon contact with his pencil moustache.

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