Men of Mercy is a learner project in my assessment. I could be wrong. However, I do feel there were some positive things about the project though, but you really had to see your way beyond a lot of poor technical execution which really prohibited you from just sitting back and taking in the movie.
Men of Mercy is about a high school girl, Sinclaire Lewis, played by Kk Starrs, from the country moving to a culturally different city and her mom pretty much choosing her new boyfriend over her daughter and son and leaves them to fend for themselves. The daughter is befriended by a bad ass girl Valerie, played by Christina Zuniga, from school and from there her life gets even more complicated to say the least.
I think the positive from this project that I want to touch on is, no way in hell would I have ever been able to come up with this story, because nothing about my life ever came close to living what these characters had to go through. I think all art comes from a little bit of truth or environment, so if writer and director A.H. Furlong has more parts of stories like this in her, she might have something there. However again, she’s gonna have to figure out all the technical aspects.
Kk Starrs gives a good performance, while Zuniga does her best with her part, even though her character seemed to be way too young to be this criminal mastermind with a plan for everything. I kind of liked the detective pairing of Valerie Loo and Christopher Studenka, even though once again, Loo’s character seemed to be way too young for the part of an experienced detective. I thought, Studenka’s character was going to turn out to be a super sleuth or something, but they decided not to go there, so he basically just stumbled into his fate if you ask me.
So yeah, I don’t know. The movie was really long and all the poor technical deficiencies really made it seem even longer. I know getting a movie made is tough, so good job to everybody for completing the project and putting it out there, but hopefully some lessons were learned with whatever comes next.
Yeah, so the good. There was this gritty, dirty feel to the project which worked even though it’s probably only that way because, again, I think it’s a beginner project. There was some good music and a lot of different locations so they were pluses. And the bad. The audio wasn’t very good at all, camera angles weren’t right, color was off from one scene to the next, so again it all just made it difficult to sit back and just watch the film and follow the story.