April Rain (2014)

April Rain (2014)- 1\2 *

Directed by: Luciano Saber

Starring: Luke Goss, Andrew Keegan, Ryan Guzman, Vincent Spano, and Ming-Na Wen

Watching The Weather Channel provides more thrills and excitement than this movie. Here’s our forecast: you won’t be watching this anytime soon. Man, we really suffer for this site. We’ve sat through plenty of turkeys, and...this is another one. While this does have that low-budget, painfully DTV look, those aren’t the main problems. The whole tone of the movie just seems off - it will occasionally lapse into being a soap opera, then there’s a silly shootout, then some horribly-written dialogue delivered flatly, then maybe some gangsterism, then some CW channel-style teen drama, and all of it comes out of nowhere and serves no real purpose.

Is this supposed to be an action movie? It’s hard to tell what the filmmakers were thinking, or even if English was their first language. Maybe something got lost in translation. But they did manage to get some DTV-level names for the cast, which is more than you might expect. Former teen heartthrob Andrew Keegan isn’t on the cover of Tiger Beat magazine anymore...here he’s some sort of Russian mobster. And Vincent Spano is a SWAT team member with marital problems. Okay. Luke Goss is a cop who is somewhat on the edge, but doesn’t seem to be able to muster up enough enthusiasm to really be on said edge. Ming-Na Wen is his boss. There’s a bunch of overlong dialogue scenes that are pretty childish. And speaking of stuff that’s juvenile...

A main part of the threat that our heroes are fighting against in this movie is the potential onslaught of terrorists on scooters. SCOOTERS. This is taken gravely seriously in the world of April Rain. To prove this point, there’s an amazingly not-badass scooter chase that director Luciano Saber probably thought was amazingly badass. Rather than a fighting force of anti-terror warriors, it looks like a dry-run rehearsal for a Sugar Ray video. 

During one of the unnecessary soap opera scenes, which takes place in a kitchen, Luke Goss is on one side of the screen, his wife is on the other, and a bag of Kettle Chips are dead center between them. For a long time. The Kettle Chips steal the show. The dialogue WE were having during this scene was more drama-intensive: “Oh, this family buys Kettle Chips? Cool.” “I wonder what flavor?” “Well, that’s the red bag, so, what is that...” “I think it may be barbeque.” “I don’t like barbeque flavored chips. That’s like taking a bite of barbeque sauce. I find that gross” “Okay, whatever, weirdo.” This is sparklingly witty dialogue compared to the leaden dullery that is April Rain. And there’s some of our hated bathroom humor/dialogue that we hate and always rail against. The strikes against the movie are piling up fast.

If you - yes, YOU reading this right now - got your friends together, broke out the old Go Pro or some other video camera, and tried to make a movie, odds are it would be vastly better than April Rain. How unmitigated crud like this gets made and distributed will always mystify us. Looks like it’s heading for the sewer...

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty