Pulpmovies Reviews

Now here’s an interesting premise… four friends find themselves on the wrong side of a crooked art dealer and need to get hold of $1 million in order to avoid finding themselves feeding fish. Their solution is to take out life insurance on each other and then to randomly select one to be a killer and one to be a victim so that three of them survive.

The four are brought together by Felix (Tim Curry) who has a plan to steal a statuette from Argentine art collector, Carlo (George Lazenby, no less) and sell it to crooked art dealer, Mr Ellington (Forest Whitaker). The film starts with the heist in progress - at the wedding of the Carlo’s daughter. This is pretty well done, with the characters displaying just the right mix of amateurism and luck to make it believable that no only could they get away with the theft, but they could also lose the statuette afterwards.

Escapes are made, the statuette is shipped and our naïve art thieves meet up with Felix at his bar to celebrate. And it’s at this point that things start to go wrong.

While the celebration is in full swing, in walks Mr Ellington along with his two thugs, one of who shoots Felix in the leg. Mr Ellington wants to know where the statuette is. Not satisfied with hearing that everything is going to plan, he starts laying on the threats and tells the gang that if they can’t sell him the statuette, they are going to have to find the aforementioned compensation or he’ll be coming after them.

So we’ve established that the buyer of this statuette is a no-nonsense kind of villain who is keen to get hold of it. But we are given no indication as to why it is so urgent. And to walk in and start making threats when everything is under control smacks of panic. I can sit here and speculate all night as to why he is panicking in this manner, but I suspect that the truth is simply that the scriptwriters wanted to get the friends into debt, under threat and unable to go to the police - and they couldn’t come up with anything less contrived than this.

Things go from bad to worse. Felix admits to having screwed up his last job and that he has dragged the red-hand gang into something much more dangerous than he’d originally let on. Then he gets killed - horribly. The four friends try to confirm that the statuette actually is on the ship… And then the panic sets in and our four rocket scientists spend the night in a bar, over drinks, trying to figure out a way of extricating themselves from this mess. What they come up with is the bizarre life insurance circle of death scheme which will force one of them to murder one other in order to raise the million dollar compensation Mr Ellington has demanded.

Up to now, the film has been going very slowly. I know from reading the back of the video box that we get to this point but it’s taken half the film to do so.

However, the waiting is over and the scheme is set in motion…

There are a lot of holes here. For a start, these four friends seem to rule out other options a bit too quckly and settle on the solution that says “one of us must be a sacrifice for the other three” a bit too easily. And the life insurance idea raises a number of questions that go unanswered. They backdate the policies to avoid suspicion - one of their number conveniently works in an insurance office - but surely any insurance company is going to spot a fraud as simplistic as this. And won’t someone query why people are taking out life insurance on their friends?

They even set a time to commit the murder before the boat is due to arrive. Even if they are sure that the statuette has gone missing, I can’t believe that - even if I was able to suspend my disbelief with regards to the rest of the plot holes - anyone would want to exhaust all other options before deciding to pull he trigger.

And then there are the characters. On the video case, Four Dogs… compares itself to Shallow Grave and The Usual Suspects. In both these films, the characters were complex, realistic and believable. In Four Dogs… the characters are one-dimensional, erratic and tend towards stereotypes. Not only did I find them hard to believe in, but also impossible to care about.

This is a shame because, If done right, this could have been a tense and original thriller. Unfortunately the contrivances and the weak characters are all a little too much and the film failed to get me onto the edge of my seat.

It has quite a nice twist at the end, though.

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