It's
rather fascinating the way the neo-grindhouse genre keeps on going.
I mean, I get it with zero budget movies made by fans of sleazy
Seventies films, but as none of the bigger budget efforts seem
to have been financial successes, their continued production is
rather baffling. Not that I'm complaining...
The Baytown Outlaws wears its grindhouse influences
proudly, and is also dripping in Tarantino-inspired dialogue,
visuals and editing – something that we perhaps don't see
that much these days. Though given that Tarantino took
his inspiration from those early grindhouse efforts himself, it's
easy for everything to become confused... in any case, this is,
for the most part, an entertainingly relentless tale of violence
that becomes more deliriously insane as it progresses.
The film opens with hitmen brothers the Oodies - Brick (Clayne
Crawford), McQueen (Travis Fimmel) and mute man-mountain Lincoln
( Daniel Cudmore) - carrying out a job at a local house, only
to find they have the wrong address after killing everyone inside.
But every cloud has a silver lining, and when Celeste (Eva Longoria),
a witness to the slaughter, approaches them with $25,000 to grab
her wheelchair-bound godson from her estranged husband, it seems
like an offer the boys can't refuse. Unfortunately, the husband
in question is mob boss Carlos (Billy Bob Thornton), who doesn't
take kindly to having his home wrecked and godson snatched, and
soon the brothers are on the run, pursued by gun-toting hookers,
Mad Max inspired road warriors and arrow-shooting
Native Americans. Meanwhile, their benefactor and local sheriff
(Andre Braugher) is under investigation by the feds and is preparing
to sacrifice the boys who've helped keep his town so crime-free...
First
time director Barry Battles handles all this with the panache
you'd expect from a more experienced hand, and the film barely
pauses from moment to moment. The cast are uniformly excellent,
bringing more dimension to their characters than you might expect,
and the whole film is slickly edited. That said, it's clearly
quite derivative. The assorted groups who turn up to track the
boys down are pure Tarantino, for instance, and while it's amusing
to suddenly see an armoured futuristic vehicle barrelling down
the road after the outlaws, you can't help thinking that the film
is trying to cram too much in. As such, these eccentric and intriguing
villains tend to be despatched a little too quickly – the
supposedly bad-ass, lingerie-clad killer whores are built up nicely
but then put up as much a challenge as a bus load of arthritic
pensioners.
But these niggles aside, The Baytown Outlaws
is fast and furious fun – violent, profane, outlandish,
often funny and occasionally touching. Fans of balls-to-the-walls
action or good ol' boy Southern action should find this more than
satisfactory.
It's
rather fascinating the way the neo-grindhouse genre keeps on going.
I mean, I get it with zero budget movies made by fans of sleazy
Seventies films, but as none of the bigger budget efforts seem
to have been financial successes, their continued production is
rather baffling. Not that I'm complaining...
First
time director Barry Battles handles all this with the panache
you'd expect from a more experienced hand, and the film barely
pauses from moment to moment. The cast are uniformly excellent,
bringing more dimension to their characters than you might expect,
and the whole film is slickly edited. That said, it's clearly
quite derivative. The assorted groups who turn up to track the
boys down are pure Tarantino, for instance, and while it's amusing
to suddenly see an armoured futuristic vehicle barrelling down
the road after the outlaws, you can't help thinking that the film
is trying to cram too much in. As such, these eccentric and intriguing
villains tend to be despatched a little too quickly – the
supposedly bad-ass, lingerie-clad killer whores are built up nicely
but then put up as much a challenge as a bus load of arthritic
pensioners. 
• 