As a “female” stripper sporting five o’clock shadow shakes his groove thang onstage, a Joe Friday voice intones that we are, in fact, watching the opening gambit of a heist.
Heist films generally fall into one of two categories. They are:
1. Old pro goes after one last score.
2. A team of people comes together to pull off an impossible, albeit fiscally lucrative criminal act.
“Six Figures” falls squarely into the second category. Ty and Country Boy are a rapper and a deejay, respectively, who find themselves with a demo they are unable to sell due to tight lyrics over bad beats (Bad, in this case, not meaning good, but, er, bad. As in, not good.) They cut a deal with a deejay who, for fifty grand, will provide them with the new, improved beats they require to secure a record deal.
Ty is struck by a thought – why not rip off the strip joint Country Boy works for? Utilizing various strip club employees, they can jack the place on a busy Friday night, and split the six-figure sum equally among the team players.
The strip club employees break down like so – The Bouncer, who needs twenty grand to pay off his debt to a dug dealer, The Stripper, who wants to take the money to escape from her shiftless, abusive boyfriend, and The Security Guard, who, it seems, just wants the cash.
Various complications, double-crossings, and gunplay ensues, because, as was pointed out at the top of this review, this is a heist film. To say the team escapes from the club with the money is no big secret, since heist is laid out in the opening moments of the flick, save a few details which become key moments before the credits roll.
The story of Brandon David’s previous film is one that is well documented here on Film Threat. King Midas had several real drug dealers in the film, many of whom were arrested following production. David knows the territory he is covering here, and the lives of his characters seem un-glamorous and real. The writing is, for the most part, sharp (The Bouncer, told he’d have nothing to complain about if he actually eliminated all the people on his hit list: “I can always make more enemies.”), and the directing and editing plays like the long-anticipated melding of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie.
Where the film falls apart is in the acting, which is all over the map. Most of the leads are solid and have a natural delivery, but by the time the film reaches its outermost characters, the thespian level goes sub-par, making it hard to take the film seriously. Also unfortunate is some not-very-well ADRed dialogue, a once-errant boom mike, and what appears to be an occasional missing foley.
In the last fifteen minutes, however, all is forgiven as twist piles on top of twist, and Brandon shows himself more than happy to wipe out player after playuh, until the last man standing walks with the loot. Whatever weaknesses there are here, they don’t get in the way of the fast-paced and amusing caper.
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