CHARLIE THE OX A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
CHARLIE THE OX is a classic crime comedy with old fashioned movie music to match. A real crowd-pleaser, it is a cute tale with nice small twists around every corner.
A team of serious crooks are worried than an amateur may mess up their big score. They know of an aging safe about to be replaced by an uncrackable new one. They plan on breaking into it while the money is still easy to grab, but they are worried that the incompetent safecracker, Charlie the Ox (Cory McAbee), will show up, as he likes to do whenever some else is stealing something, causing their heist to quickly go downhill.
To prevent this, they hire a bad actor named Freddy Boon (Jon Polito, MILLER'S CROSSING) to in turn hire Charlie to actually crack the safe so that they can better control Charlie's actions. It's a complicated script, filled with funny moments, none better than the one with a small dog who almost exposes the robbers.
Writer and director Scott Smith, who was at our screening, said the story could be viewed as a metaphor for breaking into anything, especially a hard to crack profession like filmmaking. Well, with his keen sense of pacing and wit, Scott appears to be one to have found the combination to open the cinematic safe.
CHARLIE THE OX runs 1:33.
The film is being shown as part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival (www.Cinequest.org), which runs March 2-13, 2005.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email?
Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39513 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1368076 X-RT-TitleID: 10005036 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 2.5/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews