200 DEGREES (2017)

Studio:       Level 33 Entertainment
Director:    Giorgio Serafini
Writer:       Garry Charles
Producer:  Scott Dolezal, Robert Willems, Eric Balfour
Stars:     Eric Balfour, Joe Grisaffi, Kristin Cochell, LaDon Drummond

Review Score:

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Summary:

A stockbroker trapped in an industrial kiln must find a way to meet his captor’s ransom demand before being burned alive.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Stockbroker Ryan Hinds wakes to find himself sealed inside an industrial kiln with no recollection of how he got there or who kidnapped him. Ryan receives a call on his cellphone from his associate Bruce, who reports being in the same situation. Bruce briefly recalls partying with Ryan and two women in a hotel room the previous night. Before their call is cut off, Bruce is heard screaming from an apparent increase in heat on his end.

The disguised voice of Ryan’s captor comes over a speaker. The Keeper demands that Ryan turn over one million dollars of his money. With the kiln room starting at one hundred degrees, the Keeper threatens that the temperature will rise three degrees every five minutes until funds are transferred.

Ryan’s first phone call is to his estranged brother John, a police sergeant. Ryan explains his situation. John promises to trace the phone’s signal and rescue his brother.

Ryan offers to give the Keeper his expensive watch. The Keeper instead forces Ryan to smash his watch on the floor.

Desperate to put together the money, Ryan calls his wife Anna and his mother Valerie without mentioning his predicament. Ryan convinces both women to transfer a portion of the ransom.

John calls Ryan to tell him the police traced his signal and are outside. However, it turns out that John was directed to an empty warehouse where he finds a note that reads, “I have them.”

Fearing for his family’s safety, Ryan calls his wife again. Anna confirms that their son Larry is safe at school, but Anna is seemingly kidnapped while on the phone with Ryan.

Ryan begins calling investors. Ryan concocts multiple stories to convince these men to send money to him.

Ryan eventually collects all of the cash and transfers it as instructed. However, the Keeper points out that he asked specifically for Ryan’s money. The Keeper reveals that he knows about four million dollars Ryan secretly set aside for himself. Ryan is forced to transfer all four million dollars. The temperature in the kiln room finally starts dropping.

After Ryan has some time to recover, the Keeper reveals that he knows Ryan secretly has a second wife named Leslie. Ryan opens a box that the Keeper slipped into the room and finds Leslie’s severed finger inside.

The Keeper puts Ryan on a conference call with Anna and Leslie, who did not previously know about each other. Ryan is forced to admit to using dozens of aliases to swindle people out of money. Ryan also confesses that he only married Leslie for her money, but truly loves his wife Anna.

Ryan removes a gun from the box containing the finger. The Keeper gives Ryan a choice between killing himself or allowing the two women to die in order to walk free. Ryan puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger, but nothing happens.

The kiln door unlocks. Ryan steps outside and confronts his brother John, who is revealed to be the Keeper. John mentions his son Adam, who died from cancer. John holds Ryan accountable for refusing to give John a loan that would have paid for Adam’s medical treatments. John reveals that he discovered his brother’s double life when he was called to Leslie’s house on a robbery and saw her wedding photos on the wall.

Anna and Leslie enter, revealing that they were in on the plan to get revenge on Ryan and take his money all along. As Anna asks her husband about his admission of love for her, Leslie suddenly shoots Anna dead. On an open laptop, Leslie notices the funds automatically transferring back to Ryan’s account. Leslie and John realize that Ryan figured out who was setting him up and turned the tables. John shoots and kills Leslie.

Ryan runs down the three clues (the watch, a verbal slip by Anna, and Leslie’s supposed severed finger) that tipped him off to the trio’s plot against him. Ryan further discloses that the money transfer was coded with the word “delta” to indicate duress, and automatically corrected after an hour elapsed.

John tries bargaining with his brother. Instead, Ryan locks John inside the kiln with the two dead bodies and leaves the industrial warehouse.

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Review:

The night Ryan Hinds doesn’t remember has quickly become a day he will never forget.  Ryan has no recollection of the who or the how, let alone the why, but when he wakes from unconsciousness, Ryan finds himself locked inside a large industrial kiln.

A disguised voice over a speaker presents a problematic proposition.  Using nothing but the cellphone in his pocket, Ryan must come up with a one million dollar ransom.  This would be a tall task under ordinary circumstances, even for this silvertongued stockbroker.  But Ryan faces the additional pressure of the room temperature rising three degrees for every five minutes it takes to conjure the cash.

Who is his captor and what does he want besides money?  Ryan will require every ounce of ingenuity as a slickster to unravel the mystery and escape, provided his blood doesn’t boil first.

I picture “200 Degrees” starting life as someone suggesting, “how can we do the same thing as the Ryan Reynolds thriller ‘Buried,’ but seem slightly different?  I’ve got it!  Instead of slowly suffocating in a coffin, our trapped hero will slowly be burned alive in a kiln!”  Then a second person said, “okay, but let’s make sure the ending is loaded with so many batsh*t ridiculous reveals that it makes Key & Peele’s ‘Mexican Standoff’ sketch seem reasonably realistic by comparison.”

If the entire movie were as gleefully silly as its final scenes, it would be easy to smirk, forgive, and then grant “200 Degrees” a blessing for being “guilty pleasure” entertainment.  Unfortunately, “200 Degrees” is blandly boring for the most part, operating on a premise too thin to sustain suspense for a full 90 minutes.

Setups like this regularly require a significant suspension of disbelief that someone so hellbent on revenge would concoct, prepare, and then execute an elaborate plot involving outrageous amounts of time, effort, and risk.  Such an absurdity ends up acceptable in movies such as “Saw” however.  Because with the way that world is presented from the beginning of its intricate mystery, the final curtain pull is no crazier than anything before that point.  Every end is tied together in an imaginative manner befitting that film’s mood.

SPOILER

This movie demands leaving your logic function turned off for much longer to achieve a less satisfying result.  “200 Degrees” asks the impossible by wanting its audience to swallow a notion that three tenuously connected people would be willing to invest in the same insane scheme.  It’s ludicrous given the kind of grounding the film has.  It’s also too little, too late to save a story that runs out of steam in its first act anyway.

END SPOILER

“200 Degrees” doesn’t build a breadcrumb trail of intrigue.  It follows a barren path leading to a loaf of exposition at the eleventh hour.

Few puzzle pieces are provided with which the audience can play along as amateur gumshoes.  We’re given scraps of suspects and events leading up to Ryan’s capture, and just as little regarding who Ryan even is, making most of the movie a waiting game to have things explained instead of a genuine caper to be solved.

“200 Degrees” at least knows the limits of its loose ends.  Garry Charles’ script virtually shouts, “I know, I know!” at every unexplained implausibility.  Astounded at the information in one person’s possession, a character asks, “how could you have known that?”  The person responds, “like I said, details.”  This is dialogue engineered to acknowledge that the screenplay has the same question you do, yet no more of an answer.

The movie also makes no bones about identifying its obvious influences.  Not only does naming the main character Ryan nod directly at “Buried,” but Ryan’s captor apparently purchased his voice distorter from the same villainy shop as Jigsaw.

“Buried” had the benefit of Ryan Reynolds’ charisma to carry momentum during downtime.  Eric Balfour’s Ryan on the other hand, bears the stink of being a bad guy from the beginning.  Without any sympathy in sight, what we see of Ryan is his skill at conducting verbal con games.  A full 20-minute chunk is handed over to Ryan on the phone with investors, fabricating phony stories so they’ll float funds at him.  Where is the excitement in this?

Balfour is fine overall.  His voice-only costars are less convincing.  One of the phone characters shouts about a similar predicament with all the energy of a sleeping pill.  Another discusses the pain of a severed finger with the same tone used to order lunch at a Taco Bell drive-thru.

Even if the idea hadn’t been done before, and done better, “200 Degrees” wouldn’t have the legs to walk out of the trenches of home video filler.  Tension is tame.  Suspense equals stalling.  And a climax that completely loses its mind can’t come close to saving the movie from succumbing to its own staleness.

Review Score:  40

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