13 SINS (2014)

Studio:       Dimension Films
Director:    Daniel Stamm
Writer:       David Birke, Daniel Stamm
Producer:  Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Steven Squillante, Kiki Miyake
Stars:     Mark Webber, Rutina Wesley, Devon Graye, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Richard Burgi, Tom Bower, Ron Perlman

Review Score:

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Summary:

When a phone call from a mysterious stranger offers a million dollar prize for completing 13 challenges, Elliot Brindle finds himself in a contest that tests every limit of his character.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Perth, Australia – At a banquet where he is accepting a Lifetime Achievement award, Professor Edgar Solomon delivers a strange speech involving dirty jokes and limericks before cutting off the fingers of the woman presenting him. As the patrons in the hall flee in horror, Solomon is confronted at gunpoint by security. Solomon reaches in his jacket for a ringing cell phone and is shot.

New Orleans, Louisiana – In the midst of preparing for his upcoming wedding to pregnant fiancée Shelby, Elliot Brindle is fired from his job as a salesman. Elliot also learns that his mentally handicapped brother Michael requires new housing, as does Elliot’s father who is being evicted from his retirement home.

Stopped at a red light, Elliot receives a phone call offering $1,000 if Elliot kills the fly buzzing inside in his car. After Elliot swats the fly, he instantly receives a notice of the $1,000 deposit in his bank account. As a second challenge, Elliot is offered more money to eat the fly. After doing so, the voice asks Elliot if he is willing to participate in a game that involves completing 13 challenges for a seven-figure cash prize. The only rules are that Elliot cannot tell anyone he is playing, and he cannot interfere with the game or try to find the origins of those involved.

Challenge #3 tasks Elliot with making a child cry. Challenge #4 is to burn a nativity scene, which inadvertently results in Elliot setting fire to a church. Challenge #5 is to trade an ostrich for the clothes of a homeless man. By this time, Detective Chilcoat pieces together that the same man may be involved in all of these crimes as complaints come in to police.

For challenge #6, Elliot has to bring a dead man to a diner and place a cup of coffee in front of him. Circumstances force Elliot to confront a quartet of police officers in the process, prompting the voice to award Elliot with completion of the seventh challenge for his improvisational efforts.

In the course of his investigation, Chilcoat finds a man named Vogler poking around the crime scene at the diner. Chilcoat visits Vogler, but Vogler flees after accusing the detective of being part of the conspiracy.

Challenge #8 transports Elliot by bus to a motel room where he amputates the arm of John Witter, a man who used to bully Elliot in grade school. After taking John to the hospital afterwards, Elliot knocks out John’s brother with a chair, which ends up completing the ninth challenge.

Challenge #10 is to destroy the wedding hall while singing in front of the guests at his rehearsal dinner. Security arrives for Elliot’s brother Michael, accused of exposing himself to a girl in the park, and Elliot uses the opportunity to complete the challenge. Challenge #11 is to turn himself in to the authorities.

When the police captain leaves the interrogation room, a metal bar breaks from Elliot’s chair. He then uses it to take the captain hostage. Commotion ensues, but Elliot ultimately escapes the station, although he loses the phone used to communicate with the voice in the process.

Chilcoat tracks down Vogler and convinces the man to divulge what he knows about the secret organization behind the game. Vogler tells tales of a worldwide conspiracy dating back generations and involving events such as the JFK assassination.

Believing that she must be part of the game, Elliot follows an old woman to her home where she has him secure a metal wire clothesline, which completes challenge #12. Elliot then sees a group of bikers racing down the street towards the wire, but Elliot manages to take down the line before they get there. Elliot begins to leave and another man repairs the line. The lead biker receives a phone call and the motorcyclists turn around. Elliot tries to stop them a second time, but the bikers are beheaded by the metal line. In frustration over the deaths, Elliot vows to quit the game.

Leaving the scene, Elliot encounters a group of people and hears the familiar ringtone used by the voice. He follows a man suspected of being a competing player to his father’s retirement home. There, Elliot discovers that Michael is also a contestant in the game and that challenge #13 is the same for all players: to kill a family member.

Elliot tries talking Michael out of killing their father. The father then reveals that he once played the game and won the final challenge by killing their mother in an intentional car accident. To bitterly prevent Elliot from winning the game, his father then slits his own throat.

Elliot tries leaving with Michael, but is forced to shoot his brother when Michael reaches into a bag where his own gun is. Elliot then receives a text message that he has won the game and he leaves the scene.

Revealed as an employee of those running the game, Chilcoat arrives to destroy all of the evidence against Elliot. Elliot returns to confront Chilcoat. Chilcoat reminds Elliot that if he interferes, he will forfeit the prize. Elliot kills Chilcoat anyway and ends up losing all of the money.

Elliot talks to Shelby over the phone and learns that the police no longer have records of the crimes he committed over the course of the game. He also discovers that Shelby took a phone call similar to the one he received, but she refused to eat the fly out of disgust and hung up.

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Review:

Heaven help the 99% if everyday entertainment like music, movies, and television ever becomes too pedestrian for the Billionaire Boredom Club.  According to genre films, it is basically a given that diabolical plots of impossible scope are the only surefire cure for a rich person’s ennui, and us Average Joes will be the fodder for that cannon.

The Zoe Bell thriller “Raze” showcases kidnapped women pit-fighting in a fatal battle royale for the closed-circuit amusement of Rockefeller types unsatisfied with the passé violence of a UFC cage match.  The more hands-on variety of upturned noses with money to burn has Eli Roth’s “Hostel” to scratch their perverted pleasure itch.  And then there is the shadowy Illuminati group pulling the puppet strings on the global game featured in “13 Sins.”  At least the “13 Sins” elite have some misguided moral motivation of inspiring the meek to summon a fighting strength they never knew was in them.

Elliot Brindle is such a born failure with the world’s worst luck that the only thing he might excel at would be a job as a cooler in a Las Vegas casino.  Already up to his thinning hairline in debt, Elliot has a pregnant fiancée, a racist father evicted from a retirement home, and a mentally handicapped brother whose medical insurance is expired.  As if this did not add up to financial trouble enough, the summons to his boss’ office results in an unexpected firing instead of a presumed promotion.

Then an out of the blue phone call from an unknown man offers one thousand dollars to hurt a fly, which is just the first elbow nudge from the movie’s not-always-subtle sense of humor.  Challenge #2 triples the reward if Elliot agrees to eat the fly.  Once that is out of the way, Elliot is given the option to keep completing increasingly difficult tasks all the way up to challenge #13 and a seven-figure cash prize.

It doesn’t take the Delphi Oracle to divine where things go from here.  “13 Sins” plays out as a less gore-focused version of “Saw” where a mysterious mastermind challenges a “why me?” Everyman to run a gauntlet of macabre mania that could not possibly take place in the real world, yet makes for one inventively entertaining movie.

It initially appears as though director and co-writer Daniel Stamm, adapting the 2006 Thai thriller “13: Game of Death,” might be leaning on so glib of a tone that even he does not take his own script seriously enough.  Elliot’s confrontation with his Rick Roma of a supervisor includes an on-the-nose aside of bossman cracking walnuts while giving Elliot a verbal pink slip in the form of an emasculating tongue lashing.

Yet as “13 Sins” spins further into wild territory with its premise, Stamm accompanies the suspense and the horror with moments involving an ostrich, the dorky wardrobe of a cartoon rabbit t-shirt, and even a goofy “Weekend at Bernie’s” homage.  What Stamm is really doing is giving a wink to the audience that lets them know he is in on the joke.  “13 Sins” merely wishes to have a good time with its concept without going overboard on justifying disbelief with too sincere of a theme.

“13 Sins” boasts a great supporting cast, though more than a few of them serve no nobler purposes than as red herrings or conveniently placed exposition dumps.  Rutina Wesley is a terrific actress, but buying no-nonsense tough girl Tara Thornton from “True Blood” as sad sack Elliot’s doting wife is a stretch.  Ron Perlman slides in as smoothly as ever, yet his detective’s ultimate value is also questionable.  Still, the occasional plot contrivance only requests as much absolution from the audience as is absolutely necessary to keep the clip moving speedily.

Imagine Bill Gates or Warren Buffett secretly sitting in their presumably palatial estates sipping a vintage Chateau Lafite Rothschild as they watch some Johnny Lunchpail fight through increasingly dire scenarios while the rest of us make do with an NCAA Final Four game.  If that notion makes you chuckle, being on board with the style of “13 Sins” is an easy proposition.  If that seems like such a far-fetched idea that it elicits eye-rolling anger, “13 Sins” probably will too.

Stabbing holes in the details and logic of “13 Sins” is like bazooka-blasting fish in a Dixie cup.  Of course the scenario is unrealistic.  “13 Sins” implies that the JFK assassination was a challenge for contestant Lee Harvey Oswald, after all.  But that is why it is called “escapist entertainment.”  Instead, occupy the time with mulling over the puzzle of where “13 Sins” is headed next and becoming absorbed in its mystery can end up turning into a great deal of mind-teasing fun.

Review Score:  80

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