With the emergence of post-Pulp Fiction crime thriller overkill, people have seemingly gotten bored with men in desperate situations, bullets flying around and smirking dark humor.  With few exceptions, recent crime flicks have gotten scant audience attention, even among those with the star power to be lucky enough to hit theaters at all.  (Think of the lukewarm reception given The Yards, Way of the Gun and Snatch.)  As a result, some truly original, creative entries into the field (like 1998’s Heaven) have been dumped to video without reaching U.S. theaters at all.

    Two Hands is an Australian young-man-getting-into-increasingly-desperate-situations pic that, if there was justice in the film community, would have at least nabbed a decent-sized regional release.  It did well in its’ native land, becoming the first Aussie pic to be first at the box office since Babe, and it’s easy to see why.  Two Hands is quick-witted, clever, exciting, well-acted and features more than enough individual style to stand comfortably on its own in the field of the new wave of crime thrillers

    A pre-Patriot (though post-10 Things I Hate About You) Heath Ledger stars as Jimmy, a strip bar doorman whose life isn’t really going anywhere.  When mob boss Bryan Brown offers Jimmy a chance to make money delivering $10,000, he jumps at the chance.  However, things go bad when the woman who’s supposed to accept the delivery doesn’t answer the door, and Jimmy goes to the beach to kill some time to wait for her to come back.

    After our, um, “hero” does something incredibly stupid, the money is stolen by a couple of kids, who spend it on candy and clothes.  Jimmy, fucked, tries to score the money before the mob goons catch up to him.  What follows is a series of plot twists, coincidence, and clever little moments that are really too good to be ruined by some stupid web site review written by some stupid schmuck like myself.  Suffice to say, the film has at least two moments of pure cinematic randomness that kept me in shock for at least a minute thereafter.

    The random (and yet, in the long run, carefully calculated) events in the film give it a great sense of humor unlike all the other post-Tarantino crime flicks I’ve seen.  Jimmy’s really not much of a typical charming leading man—he’s an awkward guy that does stupid things sometimes and gets himself into some incredibly insane situations.  Even Bryan Brown’s character, a mob boss that could have easily lapsed into caricature, is refreshingly human;  A guy with a family who’s just out to do what’s best for his business.

    Two Hands plays like more subtle, less style-soaked Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with grit in place of LS2B’s sometimes overbearing flashiness.  Two Hands, however, manages to be just as witty and infinitely more memorable, and it’s showy parts (Jimmy’s zombie brother shows up once in a while, for example) are really the film’s least effective parts.  The film works best when it just sits back and lets itself play out naturally, as a mob-bent cinematic experiment in chaos theory.

    I’m really glad I picked up Two Hands—as a Blockbuster exclusive title with some unmemorable box art, I’d passed this buy dozens of times knowing how little of an issue quality is in their film selections.  They probably just bought the rights because Ledger was a rising young star.  But, fortunately, now you can buy a copy cheaper than it would cost to rent (I got mine for $1.99) and I’d suggest doing to before this disappears into cinematic limbo.
 

    Main Site      Reviews Index