A year after making Boy’s War, Colin Bannon tried his hand at a more contemporary drama. In “The Grill,” Steve Silverman plays your standard workaholic yuppie scum who has neither the time nor the inclination to pay attention to his family. He chokes on a piece of meat while grilling dinner one day, and his life – as the stories go – flashes before his eyes. As it does, we realize that his present-day behavior has some not so shocking antecedents in his childhood and early adult years.
Bannon continues to demonstrate knowledge of subject matter generally considered beyond his years, while Steve Silverman plays the main character in realistic fashion (quite possible because Silverman’s day job is in the white collar world as well). Unfortunately, the idea of a grown man’s neglect of his family coming from incidents with his own parents is hardly groundbreaking cinema. Thematically, what happened to the young man was horrible. Cinematically, we’ve seen it before.
And it has to be the longest flashback a person dying of asphyxiation has ever had.
There is, however, sufficient genuine emotion and respect for the protagonists to make “The Grill” worth a look. And it’s to Bannon’s credit that it plays as if directed by someone much older.
