RIGHTEOUS VILLAINS

Directed by: Savvas D. Michael

Starring: Steven Berkoff, Gary Dourdan, Steven Brand, Jamie Crew, Lois Brabin-Platt

 Jeremiah is a young grifter robbing pensioners with a lottery scam. Jolie is an ex-prostitute, mourning the death of her husband and unborne child. The two strangers are brought together on a mission from God, to rescue a child from the clutches of a satanic cult on an isolated island…

 Righteous Villains is the second of three loosely connected films under the Saints and Savages banner, and it shares a lot of the same weaknesses and few of the strengths of the other two entries.

The film starts badly - for me, at least - with a bad case of in-media-res. This is probably the most over-used narrative gimmick in modern film-making. It basically tells the audience that, look, nothing exciting is going to be happening for a while, so here's a taste of the craziness which we will get to later. Much later…

Jeremiah gets a relatively short introduction. He's concocted a scheme of using the Postcode Lottery as a way of getting inside pensioner's homes and ransacking them for any cash or valuables. Having grown up on the streets, he's become obsessed with wealth. Jolie's introduction is a little bit more problematic. We first meet her when she arrives at the same rendezvoud as Jeremiah - where a mystic is in the process of stabbing himself with a sacred dagger. Then we get a lengthy flashback sequence to explain who she is and what her motivation for going on the mission will be.

This sequence features Gary Dourdan (Warrick from the original CSI series) as Mickey Monroe. He's a cool badass character and Dourdan's screen presence is off the charts. He rescues Jolie from a life of prostitution and they set up a pub together before tragedy ensues. The problem with this whole sequence is that the focus is always on Mickey, rather than Jolie, whose flashback this is meant to be. She ends up being a secondary character in her own backstory.

 The purpose of their mission is to rescue a child before he is fully indoctrinated into a satanic cult called the New World Order. Their journey there is likened to journeying across the River Styx, even with its own "ferryman".  Unfortunately this is the point the film totally loses itself. Any impetus in the plot is ejected as the characters meander through a tableaux of imagery on their way to find the child. The cultists seem to know who the couple are and treat them with reverence, even though they are supposedly there to thwart their plans. Then there is the heavy handed attempts at social and political satire.

The couple are brought to a kangaroo court, in which a female judge is passing sentence on people for such crimes as "sexism" (sentence: instant death) - as one character puts it, it's "payback for years of male oppression". Its difficult to see what  director/writer  Savvas D. Michael is actually aiming at here. Is he satirising the conservative right (providing a parody of their view of liberal politics) or the more liberal left (they're satanists!/We'll all be shot if they get into power!).

Further grotesqueries await the duo as they very slowly make their way to the house where the boy is being kept. There is little urgency to anything. Eventually we come full circle and find ourselves watching that scene from the beginning of the film play out in its entirety.

THE VERDICT

Watching three of  Savvas D. Michael's films in quick succession has highlighted his strengths and weaknesses as a director and writer. The look and feel and sound of his films is of a very high standard and very unique to him.  However, RIGHTEOUS VILLAINS contains a lot of the faults found in his other films - overworked dialogue, scenes which drag on forever and an inability to find a satisfactory conclusion to his storytelling.

 6 out of 10 (MikeOutWest)

RIGHTEOUS VILLAINS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR DIGITAL DOWNLOAD ON ALL PLATFORMS FROM 19TH APRIL 2021