When a convenience store robbery goes wrong, a professional thief and his true love head to Mexico pursued by the cops, a pair of drug addled hitmen and his psychotic ex-partner. Original, Love And A .45 is not. But although blatantly pillaging True Romance, Wild At Heart and Reservoir Dogs, it's written and directed
with enough style and understanding of the genre that it has enough going for it to make it a pretty decent blood spattered road movie. Gil Bellows and a surprisingly hot Renee Zellweger make a likeable couple and they are ably supported by Rory Cochrane's manic turn as the scumbag who's the source of all their woes and Jeffrey (Reanimator) Combs is clearly enjoying himself as the obligatory wacky hitman. The one handicap is its insistence on having wacky characters shoot up drugs and wave guns around instead of any real plot development which means it has run out of steam by the rather anti-climactic ending. The low budget means it's not the measure of a Tarantino or Rodriguez, but it's still at least as good as the likes of Kalifornia and Red Rock West and a lot better than the wildly over-rated Natural Born Killers.
May 5, 2007
