Altruist, The (2005)

Posted on Aug 09, 2006 under Action-suspense |

Written and directed by Mick McCleery
Starring
- Billy Franks
- Bobbi Ashton
- Mike McLaughlin
- Jonene Nelson
- Nick Cammarano

As Francis Ford Coppolla once famously said (and I keep infamously repeating), cinema can be considered an art form when a teenager can pick up a videocamera and create a feature film in her back yard. Well, Mick McCleery’s no teenager, and I’m not sure that what he was aiming for was exactly the “art” end of the arbitrary “art/entertainment” divide. But he did prove that, with the digital film revolution effectively won, a filmmaker can indeed assemble a skeleton crew and prosumer equipment and make a feature film which can compete effectively against bigger-budgeted productions in the arena that matters: Honest entertainment value. I often make excuses for microbudget cinema, and grade it on a curve which takes into account the resources available. I don’t need to to that here; The Altruist stands up against movies with a hundred times its budget and takes them without breaking a sweat.

Of course, it all comes down to the script. As far as a storycentric guy like me is concerned, a great script is indispensible for a great movie, Italian visionary directors be damned. So it’s refreshing and exhilarating to encounter a screenplay which not only builds on an intriguing premise, but also clearly betrays how much fun it was to write it.

Always be sure you like your wallpaper THIS much.

The premise is best expressed in the words used on the DVD case, in the trailer, and during the opening credits of the movie itself:

Every year in the United States 30,000 people commit murder.

In that same time 60,000 people commit suicide.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could get these people together?

And that’s the role for which Nick Andrews (Billy Franks, also star of McCleery’s previous feature Track 16 (2000)) has volunteered himself. His nonprofit organization, Terminal Assist, is ostensibly dedicated to counselling and and other services for the soon-to-be living-impaired. But behind it all, Nick’s small crack team offers a unique form of matchmaking: Boyish liaison Weese (Mike McLaughlin) assesses the needs of the terminally ill who want a quick release, and gargantuan muscle “The Force” (Nick Cammarano) lines up a local low-life who enjoys taking human life. And as long as the number-one rule of Terminal Assist is followed — no killing in the same town in which their offices are located — things work smoothly, and have for the past three years.

And thanks to the magic of forced perspective…

Which means that our story opens right when that rule is ignored, to disastrous results. The killer lined up to take out Tom Taylor (Larry Schneider Jr.) decides also to turn his skills to Tom’s wife, and Tom spends his dying breaths killing the killer.

Nick greets this double-homicide development, all over the local news shows, with a barrage of profanity which is somehow rendered classy by his English accent (appropriate, as it’s a veritable Blitzkrieg of F-bombs). The local cops have been willing to look the other way for a fee, as long as the bodies don’t land on their doorstep; but now that the blood is in their bailiwick, they start leaning on Nick to find a way to pacify the situation. So Nick takes an interest in the young widow, Teresa (Bobbi Ashton, also of Track 16) — a professional interest at first, which soon develops into a more personal one.

He’s not the only one with the impulse to comfort the widow, either; Tom’s best friend, Carl (John Innocenzo), was also the doctor who diagnosed the pancreatic cancer that Tom didn’t disclose to his wife; not only are Carl’s feelings toward Teresa a little warmer than friendly duty calls for, but he’s also guilty of fixing Tom’s medical records so that he could get a hefty insurance policy prior to checking out, and any sort of deep investigation into the circumstances surrounding Tom’s death could net him a revoked license, and possibly jail time.

Actually, they’re both standing.

The tone in a movie like this could easily be problematic. One the one hand, there’s the “wow-cool” mentality surrounding fast-talking hitmen, with witty banter about life-or-death situations. On the other, there are the real ethical issues surrounding the “right to die,” and whether a private agency providing such a service, even altruistically, can be used as a weapon. To McCleery’s credit, his screenplay renders both in proper proportion, without letting a lighthearted treatment of pre-planned murder trvialize the difficult moral implications.

And aside from demonstrating his writing chops, McCleery also shows here that he’s growing into a very confident filmmaker. Track 16 was certainly competent, but it showed perhaps a few too many instances of McCleery trying to be clever or “cute,” visual moments which draw too much attention to themselves as technical showpieces and thus work against the film as a vehicle of narrative. This time out, the cinematography and editing are nearly flawless, communicating the story deftly and without distraction.

It’s the chrome. Ladies dig the chrome.

If there are problems to the movie, they center entirely around a series of flashbacks to young Nick (Brett Heniss Jr.) and the family trauma that eventually led him to found Terminal Assist. The problems here are two-fold: 1) Very little is done to establish visually an earlier time frame for these scenes. They look fully as contemporary as the rest of the feature, despite the events therein happening at least thirty years in the past. I know that establishing a period setting is both difficult to accomplish without being obvious and expensive for microbudget filmmakers, but even altering or muting the color of the footage for the flashback scenes would have contributed to the suspension of disbelief here. 2) Apparently, Nick had no English accent when he was young! Neither did his father. His mother (Georgina Manne) did, but her’s was a soft and genteel accent, not much at all like the brash-talking Brit that Nick grew up to become. I know, sometime in the intervening decades Nick might have gone back to England and stayed there until just before opening Terminal Assist, giving him plenty of time to adopt the local diction… but if I have to think of that kind of workaround to solve the problems in the story, I’m doing the job that somebody else should have done.

Those relatively minor complaints aside, I heartily recommend The Altruist for anyone who doesn’t look at a movie’s budget to predetermine how much they should enjoy it. In fact, I think I’ll be keeping it handy to rinse my mind of the aftereffects of so many other godawful microbudget travesties and remind myself that, no, one can’t excuse bad filmmaking by blaming it on the budget.

And now, for your moment of noir…

(You’ll notice that I’ve said absolutely nothing about Billy Franks as a musician, and with good reason. Track 16 starred Franks as a singer-songwriter, and was written to feature and encompass as much of his music as possible. This time out, Franks composed the score, and contributed a couple of songs for background music — including one entitled “The Last Song You Hear,” which proves to be true for Tom Taylor. But Franks’ character Nick never breaks forth into song; McCleery’s not interested in making a string of “Elvis” movies for Franks. That being said, Billy Franks is an absolute kick-ass singer-songwriter, and there are ten free downloadable tracks available at his website.)