Splinter (2006)   

Review: written July 2010

Disappointing gang thriller

Turns out there is a reason this movie took from 2006 to 2009 to appear on DVD.. it's simply not very good. It sets out its stall as a would be ‘Training Day’ type movie exploring corruption and getting inside the gang mentality in L.A.'s less tourist friendly areas. However, despite some stylistic flourishes and a script which has a few good ideas, it falls well short of the mark.

Dreamer, a gang member, sees his brother being killed, and gets a bullet in his brain. Suffering amnesia, he and his brother Dusty, recently released from jail, set out to find out who killed their brother. Meantime, a young female cop (played by relative acting rookie Resmine Atis) with a reputation as a snitch, has been assigned to Tom Sizemore's character, an alcoholic, troubled and corrupt veteran of the force, who has clear issues with his supervisor. The supervisor is Edward James Olmos, excellent as always, in a movie that only really comes to life when he is on screen which is far too seldom. Sizemore is fairly mesmerising as the cop who has clearly fallen off the edge, and whose volatile mental state appears as confused as Dreamer's. Part of the fascination comes from real life Sizemore's own battle with alcohol and wondering how much of the performance is drawn from reality.

I imagine the makers would like to think they have cast a tale contrasting the two sides of the same coin, the gang member and the cop, each equally confused and both with equally dirty hands. However, the highly stylised nature of the directorial flourishes are not matched with corresponding production values... they appear to be so tricksy that we are constantly reminded this is a construct. The rookie cop with a gift for `seeing' how the crime was committed has moments which play like they are straight out of episodes of CSI. And worse than that, the film suffers fatally from an empty performance at its heart - Atis's rookie cop/ good cop role - which fails to add anything like the depth or charisma to share the screen with Olmos or Sizemore.

Good intentions then, but a difficult watch, for all the wrong reasons. It's an uncomfortable mix of amateur and veteran film making, a project you suspect the heavyweights got involved in to help out budding talent. From this example, some of that budding talent should perhaps be left to wither on the vine..