By Ben Bussey
There was a time when I considered Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City my absolute favourite film of the 2000s. I’m no longer quite that fond of it, but I do still appreciate its heightened comic book noir aesthetic, its brash balls-out masculinity, and its effortless sense of cool which has always seemed to come so naturally to Rodriguez. However, once the long overdue sequel Sin City: A Dame To Kill For finally arrived last year, I struggled to muster up any interest. All the early images and trailers indicated it was just going to be the same thing all over again – and well it might, given Miller’s comic book series isn’t exactly known for its nuanced storytelling and diverse visual style. They kept it simple, and that which once seemed bold, groundbreaking and supercool now just seems a bit old hat.
So, if the makers of Sin City can’t make the style work a second time, it isn’t especially surprising that a low budget Florida production from a first-time director struggles with it too. Sad to say, Fury: The Tales of Ronan Pierce is a movie which is fighting uphill struggles on just about every level. Aiming for a fun VHS action vibe, but completely lacking the wherewithal to pull it off, this is an incoherent mess of a movie which takes no time at all to descend into pure tedium.
Michael McCarthy takes the lead as Ronan Pierce, a renegade cop with a propensity for overwrought voiceover and excessive force. Indeed, renegade doesn’t so much cover it; this guy makes The Punisher seem moderate. And like The Punisher before him, he has personal reasons to be so hard on the criminals he’s so intent on taking down, as they murdered his infant daughter and abducted his wife: just another day at the office for these human trafficking, organ harvesting, drug dealing, kiddie-fiddling kitten eaters. (Well, maybe not the last thing, but this film goes to such pains to show us how vile these villains are, we wouldn’t put it past them.) Pierce wants to kill them all, so… he does. And that’s about the long and short of it.
Sounds like simple fun, and handled better it might have been. Unfortunately there’s barely one aspect of this film that’s handled correctly. It looks and sounds like shit, with murky photography and dim lighting making a great deal of the action almost impossible to follow – a situation not helped by similarly muffled sound. The script is a garbled mess, throwing in excessive backstory and voiceover at awkward intervals, making the action even harder to follow. The performances, with very few exceptions, are atrocious; Michael McCarthy (also co-writer and producer, as well as the director’s brother) might have been a good fit for a back-up goon character with two or three lines, but he’s hopelessly out of his depth in the lead, and like many of his co-stars he doesn’t seem to understand that conveying intensity does not hinge on screaming and shouting nigh-on every single line of dialogue. Jordan Elizabeth isn’t so bad, but is laboured with a pretty half-baked damsel in distress/would-be femme fatale role; Kane Hodder pops up for about two minutes just so they can put his name on the cover art, and isn’t around long enough to have any impact. The only performance that really works is that of Harry Aspinwall, who does a good job as the psychotic big boss that Pierce must make his way up to; alas, Aspinwall’s efforts don’t so much elevate the film as make you feel bad for him being laboured with a film which is so shitty in every other department.
If they were trying to give Fury that air of Rodriguez-esque effortless cool, they failed; if they were trying to give it a heightened, deliberately OTT feel in the hopes of being funny, they failed. Basically, Fury: The Tales of Ronan Pierce is a failure in every respect, and not worth a moment’s consideration.
Fury: The Tales of Ronan Pierce is released to Blu-Ray, DVD and VOD in the UK on 12th October.