23 Hours (2000)

March 13, 2002

by Nathan Shumate

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Written and directed by Eric Thornett
Starring
- David Stewart
- Jason Wauer
- Duane Rouch
- Mica
Co-produced by David Stewart and Jason Wauer

I’d caught Eric Thornett in micro-budget films a couple of times, playing supporting kung fu thugs in Lethal Force and Concealment. Apparently, he found it endearing that I had characterized him as “a silent kung fu-fighting version of Kevin Spacey,” because he volunteered to send me a copy of this movie, which he had written and directed.

Dude, the building. It’s right behind you. Dude! Dude, the building!!

Which, honestly, gave me pause. Because it doesn’t naturally follow that a guy can make a good movie just because he can look good kicking ass in a bowtie. But hey, I take all comers, so I said, “Bring it on.”

And now I publicly apologize to Eric any doubts I may have had. I’ve grown to hate the overused-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness word “frenetic,” so let me put it this way: You know the incredible opening scene of Blade? Where not just the fight choreography, but the cinematography, the editing, the music, everything combined with so much energy that you felt like every last coffee bean ever picked by Juan Valdez had just been pumped raw into your veins?

This entire movie’s like that.

No, I take that back. The opening’s actually very quiet. Nick Miles (David Stewart of Concealment) is a young nobody caught in the corporate cogs of Sardonyx Inc., in a stylized pseudo-noir milieu reminiscent of Dark City. (Stylization is a great tool — not only does it allow you to inject huge gobs of atmosphere into the movie, but it allows the budget-cramped producer from having to deal with such things as why a deskmonkey like Nick has no computer in his office.) He’s a systemized, organized sort, living by such rituals as the three-hours-to-the-minute breaks between his cigarettes (he’s trying to quit). His life is sterile, and colorless, like his office and his apartment. The little rituals are all he has going, and thus he’s up at three AM for his scheduled cigarette when suddenly it’s four AM. His drink has been refilled. His shoes aren’t set square to the wall. And his deadbolt is unlocked.

Looks like somebody didn’t get their V-8.

The next night he sets himself some traps. He measures the exact position of his shoes. He puts a piece of tape from the door to the jamb. He stays up, watching the ticking clock — then it’s suddenly four again, and he’s apparently been out.

A trip to the company psych, Dr. Albrecht (Jason Wauer), who’s been helping him quit smoking, doesn’t help so much as further confuse: Under hypnosis, all that Nick recalls are scattered images of a woman in a red dress. Determined to circumvent what the doctor dismisses as stress-related sleepwalking, he goes to a late-nite diner and watches the hand of the clock swing around to three AM…

…and suddenly it’s four AM, he’s sitting on his couch, there’s a gun in his hand, and on the coffee table in front of him is a locked briefcase with a taped-on message: “DO NOT LEAVE.”

He’s a Pez-powered kung fu machine!

Hey, Nick may be out of his depth, but he’s not an idiot. He gets the hell out one door just as somebody comes in the other, and escapes in the tunnels which connect the homes of the workers surrounding the Sardonyx complex. (By these same tunnels, he discovers that Dr. Albrecht is dead — probably shot by the gun Nick is carrying.)

This start getting incredibly surreal for Nick. Complete strangers come up to him and tell him that he’s got nowhere to run. He keeps getting fragmentary images of the woman in red in his head.

And then the trenchcoated goons start finding him. And ass starts getting kicked.

It’s time to play the music,
It’s time to light the lights…

The centerpiece of the movie, really, is the chase/fight sequence that takes up almost the entire second act. In addition to a horde of goons (including Lethal Force‘s Cash Flagg Jr.!), Nick’s main nemesis is “The Judge” — a Pez-popping fighter dressed like an off-duty maitre d’. It’s a chase that ranges all over the urban landscape. One particularly nifty part has the chase go 3-D, ranging between buildings and levels on fire escapes. Another has two thugs smarmily and silently taunting Miles, who naturally has absolutely no fighting acumen. It’s only by a combination of dumb luck and quick thinking that he keeps barely managing not to have his ass decisively handed to him, and to keep hold of the briefcase besides.

This may sound tedious to you — after all, we’re talking about basically half an hour of solid chases and hand-to-hand fighting, and really, watching two guys whomp on each other isn’t the basis of great entertainment. But this has wit. This has charm. This has charisma — the goons are the kind of fighters who stop a roundhouse kick short to pat Nick patronizingly on the cheek with the sole of one shoe. It’s simply a joy to behold. And it’s satisfying on a deeper level, too, as Nick gets more and more shaken — he’s getting further and further out of his element, and no closer to figuring out what the hell is going on.

Plus, the entire chase leads to something. More than once while watching, I feared that the wrap-up would be a complete let-down; in fact, flashbacks to the kung fu-less In the Cold of the Night kept creeping in unbidden — would the end turn out to be an utterly pointless mindgame? Uh-uh. I can’t tell you the ending; suffice it to say that a) it’s not the same as Dark City, and b) that subtext all through the movie about big corporations stealing your soul isn’t exactly unintentional.

A multi-ethnic trio of thugs. Ain’t the 21st century grand?

Obviously, the film’s not perfect; it’s shot on film, but not quite as good looking as Lethal Force, especially in its tendency to underlight interior scenes. And there are some day-for-night scenes that just… well, they don’t work. At all. But the incredibly confident mesh of cinematography and editing for the meaty action scenes is so successful that it overshadows all other failings. While 23 Hours doesn’t have the consciously-referential pop culture homage feeling of Lethal Force, I’d have to say it’s fully that movie’s equal in delivering pure joie de vivre action.

In other words, Eric, when you’ve finished post-production on your next feature, Fifth City, you’d better get a screener in the mail to me damned fast, or… well, there may just be some messy “accidents.”