DOUBLE THREAT
NEW REVIEW
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NEW REVIEW 〰️
Directed by: Shane Stanley
Starring: Danielle C. Ryan, Dawn Olivieri, Matthew Lawrence, Kevin Joy
A young man called Jimmy isn't having a good day. On his way to scattering his late brother's ashes, he stops at a convenience store only to witness a robbery-gone-wrong and on the run with convenience store clerk Natasha. Only, that wasn't just any convenience store, and those robbers were actually assassins, and Natasha is their target…
Double Threat delivers a good dose of action, decent characters and choice dialogue, although it does pile on the contrivances too.
As the film starts out you have no idea as to the mayhem that is about to ensue. Jimmy and Natasha wind up having a cute conversation about the music playing in the store, and Natasha gets mildly sexually harassed by one of her regular customers. Suddenly, people are pulling weapons and Natasha is proving to be incredibly lethal!
Poor Jimmy is an everyman - an accountant who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and finds himself tied up in this mayhem. He's not exactly a hinderance but he isn't much help either - there's a very well done gag about him trying to sort out a handgun while Natasha deals with some goons. By the time he's figured out how to have it ready to fire, the fight is already over.
Meanwhile we learn something of the people after her. Ellis is the son of the local mob boss and Natasha's ex boyfriend, and has been sent to kill her for stealing a tonne of cash. To help him, Ellis has been loaned his father's top fixer, a woman known only as Ask. She is a no-nonsense, intelligent heavy with an acerbic wit, and Dawn Olivieri brings her to life so well I hope they consider a spin-off with her character. The whole conversation around "Ellis Island" does a great job of highlighting the intellectual distance between them.
Matthew Lawrence keeps the audience's sympathies on the right side as Jimmy, the innocent guy caught up in all this. This could have been a thankless task in other films but Jimmy does have some personal growth to cover and is a positive influence on Natasha, who still harbours one or two secrets.
I first noticed Danielle C. Ryan in a little film called OSOMBIE, which despite its premise, turned out to be a very good zombie action movie. Danielle had some good action scenes involving a samurai sword. Next I saw her in RIOT, where she was an undercover FBI agent in a high security prison and had a great kitchen fight scene. Now she gets to carry her own action film and does incredibly well. However, it has to be said that there are a lot of shots during the fights which deliberately hide her face, suggesting the use of stunt doubles. Nevertheless, the action and fight scenes are very well done and Danielle makes Natasha a fun and exciting character to watch.
Double Threat is let down by its own climax, which involves a series of contrivances involving Ellis's insecurities and unwillingness to believe Natasha will really reject him, This causes him to do something pretty stupid and removes most of the threat from the situation. Still it leads to Ask delivering one of the film's best lines and allows Natasha a final bit of closure, the film would not have otherwise got to.
THE VERDICT
DOUBLE THREAT is a solid action thriller with some decent characters and witty dialogue which never denigrates into monologuing. The action is well shot, with some good fight choreography. Danielle C. Ryan has shown before that she is a good character actor, helping boost the quality of the films she's co-starred in, but here she is able to ably carry the whole film.