User Reviews

A low budget Canadian thriller. The 'hook' is that the protagonist and antagonist are brothers, one now a cop and the other a child murderer. Inevitably their path is set on a collision course but until that point we get the usual low budget investigation, shady photography, and routine join-the-dots plotting you find in these B-movies. Hong Kong would have handled the topic a lot better...

There is very little of interest to be discovered in this basically mindless Canadian production, technically a science-fictional tale set in a future large and dystopic city, wherein no sympathy can be readily found for any of the principal characters. We know that the city is a dystopia due to an active smoke machine that emits its murky product throughout the affair, and there are also small fires burning in alleys of what is in reality an industrial district of Toronto. Coherence is totally neglected within a plot that revolves about a police officer, Paul (Paul Coufos) who, along with his partner, is trying to locate a suspect in their "precinct" busily engaged in kidnapping young boys (12 thus far), and killing at least one of them. The villain, named Garrett, played by Damian Lee who also produces here and cobbles together the screenplay, is in fact found, proving to be in some fashion related to Paul by blood, with both men being manipulated in a mystical manner by a mysterious old man, but because Paul's character lacks any form of appeal, it is difficult to be concerned about what may happen to any of them. To develop a menacing aspect for a rather bland Garrett, the scenario has the latter kidnap the young son of Paul's girl friend, following which are the to be expected sequences depicting a clash of temperaments between varying ranks of police personnel, including the obligatory suspension of the rogue cop hero, in a work shot largely with video tape. Coufos poses rather than acts, although he is given free rein to violently chew scenery during several scenes, while most of the other players merely walk through their weakly written roles, not aided by tepid direction. The film is lightly budgeted, but not to an extent as to preclude effective building of sets; utilization of automobiles from the 1970s provides a particularly jarring note, as do other design shortcomings that fail to manifest a futuristic mise en scène. This is a coarse grained effort from its outset, as the production fails (if indeed an effort is even made) to combine its elements into a reasonable adventure tale, it instead being noteworthy only for offering little or nothing that might earn a recommendation for viewers.