“Expiration” is a good looking but dumb little film about a young Canadian whose decision to marry his pregnant girlfriend leads to all sorts of trouble. The pair go to Montreal for a night on the town, but the gal gets ill after drinking too much wine and passes out in their car. When the guy goes to a pharmacy for medicine, he walks into a robbery and his engagement ring gets stolen. Also in the pharmacy is another girl (prettier than the passed-out preggie) who is a drug courier; her stash gets stolen in the hold-up. Conveniently, the robber dropped a clue to his identity and this pair flatfoots it around Montreal, going to unlikely happenings as a lesbian wedding and a Russian roulette game using contaminated HIV blood vials, in search of the robber. The pregnant chick eventually wakes up and wanders around the streets, where she is assaulted and then taken under the wings of some prostitutes who imagine she is part of their sisterhood.
The film is so rickety and inane that it is actually becomes entertaining for the wrong reasons. If anyone bothered to call the police (the way sane people do in real life), there would be no film. The acting is strictly amateurish across the board and filmmaker Gavin Heffernan, casting himself in the leading role, is so boyish and goofy that it seems he belongs in a WB tween sitcom rather than in this pseudo-noir tale.
The saving grace is the excellent cinematography by Sebastian Grobys and Ben Dally, who make this no-budget effort look like a million bucks. There is one sunset scene which is literally eye-opening in its gorgeous composition. “Expiration” is the rare film which is a pleasure to look at but a labor to endure.
