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Illegal Tender (2007)
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Reviews Counted:47
Fresh:8
Rotten:39
Average Rating:4/10
Consensus: Lackluster acting and a ridiculous plot make the over-the-top Illegal Tender an unrealistic bust.
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for violence, language and some sexuality.
Runtime: 1 hr 48 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Aug 24, 2007 Limited
Box Office: $3,054,430
Synopsis: After the gangsters who killed his father come to settle a score, a teenage boy and his mother turn the tables on the killers. Producer John Singleton (Four Brothers, Hustle & Flow) and... After the gangsters who killed his father come to settle a score, a teenage boy and his mother turn the tables on the killers. Producer John Singleton (Four Brothers, Hustle & Flow) and writer/director Franc. Reyes (Empire) join forces to tell the story of one Latino family's quest for honor and revenge as the hunted become the hunters in the new thriller Illegal Tender. Wilson De Leon, Jr. (Rick Gonzalez) is an exceptional college student with an adoring girlfriend, doting mother and a future full of promise. He has never wanted for anything, and he has never been forced to stand his ground. But when ghosts from his mother's past come back to haunt his present, he must defend his family...and quickly turn into the strong man his father prayed he'd become. Nothing could stop Wilson's mother, Millie (Wanda De Jesus), from protecting her two boys. Forced to flee her home after gangsters killed her husband, she made an oath to give her children only the best. But all that changes when an enemy from the past catches up with them. It's finally time to take action--and now, they're done running. Weapons at the ready, Wilson, Jr. and Millie prepare for a final showdown with the murderer who robbed him of a father and her of a husband. Now, in a battle fueled by family ties and blood feuds, it will become very clear what happens when anyone tries to come between this son and his mother. --© Universal Pictures [More]
Starring: Rick Gonzalez, Wanda De Jesus, Dania Ramirez, Tego Calderon
Starring: Rick Gonzalez, Wanda De Jesus, Dania Ramirez, Tego Calderon, Manny Perez, Gary Perez
Director: Franc. Reyes
Director: Franc. Reyes
Screenwriter: Franc. Reyes
Producer: John Singleton
Composer: Heitor Pereira
Studio: Universal Pictures
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Reviews for Illegal Tender
You know the film is off to a paltry start when you see the rookie Rick Gonzalez attempt to strut bad-boy, awww-yeah stuff. Instead, he feels like a 21-year-old boy just going through puberty.
A throwback to 1970s blaxploitation flicks, with a Latin accent, Illegal Tender would be a brassy, sassy guilty pleasure if it were more, well, pleasurable.
It's helpful if you walk in with the expectation that it is a genre picture -- not a parody, not camp, but a loving homage to gangster movies of the 1980s like Scarface.
The movie isn't manic enough to qualify as pulp or coherent enough to serve as a social critique.
...a lurid and overwrought action film that imagines it's a drama of a family in crisis. In the end it doesn't really succeed as either.
There are so many chances for Illegal Tender to get things right that it's depressing to realize that it misses all of them.
While Illegal Tender has misguided pretensions towards Serious Filmmaking, it's surprisingly likeable if you see it instead as a cheesy thriller good for a lazy Friday night.
Illegal Tender isn't a very good film, but it shows a genre filmmaker who is full of ideas and unwilling to settle.
Pure B-movie hokum...a cheesy, goofy combination of family melodrama and gangster cliche that strains not only credulity but patience.
De Jesus' outbursts are the only excitement in 'Illegal,' since the performances of most of the rest of the cast are barely amateurish and Reyes' story is not so much old-school as it is old-hat.
Pic is too muted to have much lasting impact, and remains modestly diverting only on a scene-to-scene basis.
More care seems to have been taken with the cut of Gonzalez's sideburns than with the shape of the story, and the hyperbolic soundtrack does most of the work of the mise en scene.
The real mystery here is why this slapdash semi-effort didn't go straight to video.
Produced by John Singleton for writer-director Franc. Reyes, this preposterous tale of crime-family values should be far more entertaining than it is.
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