User Reviews

I first caught sight of this movie through a small article on a flick site. The theme interested me, and Ving on the cast made me rent it.

James is not the best actor in the world, surely not as bad as his older lookalike, Lambert, but it's not fair to say he's not right for the part. I thought he was the only guy acting like the movie needed him to. I felt a lot of genre satire, and his apparent over-the-topping was precisely what I thought made Malone a pleasant character. Don't forget he did the amazing Stander in 2003, and worked great with Deborah Unger (now, she's something else...). Although he also did the pitiful Punisher.

As for Elsa... what a disappointment! Her Spanish- Italian accent makes the character sound like an amateur Pakistani singer trying to qualify for American Idol. Stupid accent, absurd acting... but a fine looking woman nonetheless. But in reality, the biggest casting mistake was here... a more skilled actress, or at least, one who had a proper believable accent perhaps. (I doubt an emigrant could be so eloquent and yet have such a weird accent, so that made her totally over the top).

Then, the "villain", Whitmore... never saw that actor before - that might not be a bad thing, though. But it was, he never felt dense, intense, or cruel... it's like he sounds like a detached and unrelated personage, someone who does not fit the movie. His output is the most evidently out of sync and the weakest of all, but I don't think this was a casting mistake - it's just bad writing and bad directing.

Then there's so many holes in the writing... when Matchstick holds the kerosene against Evelyn and stupid Malone doesn't shoot his ass. What could he do? Wet her full of kerosene?

I thought there was more attention given to the dialogs of Malone and Evelyn, and the speeches of Matchstick, that with any other character's discourse. Of course, Matchstick is annoying after 2 minutes into the film... his over-predictable and over-stereotyped infancy stories, his over-obsessed body language (the site does no allow me to use the proper scientific word for spacial body management) and his stubborn persistence throughout all the film kill the few moments of glory that Hutchison can provide for his faulty character.

Finally, the real great character... Frankie The Crooner, played by the hilarious French Stewart. I hadn't seen Stewart since his 3rd rock from the sun days. In this movie I got to hear him swear and play a pimp crooner wannabee. Loved his look, feel, output, delivery, all perfect. Too bad he's not cast more often.

Also the Stallone conspiracy: the car (1952 Chop Top Buick Straight 8) is the same as in Cobra, the mom is the same character idea as in "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot"... I see a Stallone pattern. I also agree that Matchstick is a timid attempt at recreating a villain as cunning and cruel as the Joker - the myth portrayed by the eternal Ledger, that Ving's Boulder is a rip off of Miller's Sin City character, Manute... and that the Mauler is the other Asian ninja hooker in Sin City, but she actually speaks (although poorly) in this flick. So a lot of this film is a collection of faulty rip-offs. Even the name Malone has been used countless times in this genre before!

Seriously, you need a writer? I'll script you right up!

Final words: it's a 5 for me. Because for all it's faulty downsides, it's actually a reasonably fun and funny film to watch, against all expectations. Something in it's imperfections makes it oddly unique, and almost so-bad-it's-good. There's something that came out OK in the end for me, but I can't really say what it was... maybe I was impressed by the first 3 minutes (the best part), and gave the rest a "discount". But I think it's the better part of the dialogs (as I hated the editing, too), I thought was funny, had verve and could keep me there, waiting for the next cheap and clever punch line. Or the cool car (rip-off, nonetheless), or the automatic revolver, or the way Malone was always half dead... or Pataki's swift nude scene. Well, I thought the movie had enough effort in it for me to deliberate and expose a supported opinion has a lover of all cinema, from mainstream to under-achieved.

As a big fan of film noir, The trailer grabbed my attention with some pretty entertaining visuals and some intense music.

It took me about 25 minutes for my enthusiasm to dwindle. Once the feeling set in, I was unable to shake it off.

Credit where credit is due, Thomas Jane deserves a pat on the back. With roughly 80 percent of screen time, I'm glad to say that he has the least cringe worthy moments of the movie. The odds of his accomplishment were stacked against him, since he is given nothing more to play with than a character that is riddled with more cliché's than the body count he racks up through the film.

Very few other cast members came out of this with any dignity to their performances. Two that are worth mentioning are French Stewart, who plays a talentless club singer. The few scenes he has, are pure gold. The other performance that I thought had merit, came from Leland Orser. I have seen him a fair number of times playing less-than-stable parts and it was pleasing to know that he could play against the more colourful characters too.

It is important for me to make it clear that I don't think any actor/actress was to blame for the lack of entertainment in this movie. The script was poorly written. Malone can be summed up in three words.

Tough. Alcoholic. Vengeful These three things are hammered into the audience every minute from the establishing shot to the end credits.

The character of Evelyn was used to contain about,7 stereotypes of character and plot devices that you would associate with the film genre. It made it impossible for the actress to connect with the audience and by the end you feel nothing for her. No anger, no love, just nothing.

Again, the performance by Elsa Pataky gets two thumbs up for trying to play with the crap hand that she had been dealt. The problem comes from laziness in narrative structure.

That is the sentiment that I have taken from this film, that the puppet masters behind this calamity were lazy. The best example I can pull from the movie was in the third act. Malone take out an adversary and there is one of the most poorly edited sequences I have seen in some time. I will not spoil the ending for you, but If you have the ability, watch the last (approx) 20 minutes, it should not be hard to find.

I looked up the word "incongruous" on one of those online dictionaries and all I found was an embedded video of Give 'em Hell, Malone playing on an endless loop. This thing has quite a few relatively clever elements but nothing whatsoever to tie them all together, producing a film that makes it about half way through on the strength of those elements and then implodes. The last half of this movie is almost amazingly terrible and you can practically see the filmmakers shrugging their shoulders as ever more stupid, illogical and arbitrary nonsense spills out onto the audience.

Malone (Thomas Jane) is a hard man with a big gun making his Raymond Chandleresque way through the urban jungle. He's given a job of picking up a briefcase and finds himself the target of a slew of thugs, who he dispatches with brutal alacrity. Inside the case, Malone finds a toy elephant he calls "the meaning of love". Teaming up with the woman in red who hired him (Elsa Pataky), Malone finds himself on the run from a trio of noirish supervillains hired by crime boss Whitmore (Greg Harrison) to retrieve the case. Battling the vicious Mauler (Chris Yen), brooding Boulder (Ving Rhames) and insane Matchstick (Doug Hutchinson) in turn, with occasional stops at the nursing home so his mother (Eileen Ryan) can sew up his wounds, Malone bulldozes his way to an ending that frantically reaches for the heights of The Usual Suspects but falls to the depths of a self-referential circle jerk.

Give 'em Hell, Malone appears to be the result of somebody who saw Sin City and walked away very impressed but with no understanding of how that sort of "cartoon noir" storytelling works. The result is a standard action flick with a bunch of anachronistic quirks which never have any point. For example, the characters of Malone, Boulder and Evelyn (Elsa Pataky) are straight out the 1940s in speech pattern and behavior. On the other hand, Whitmore and Malone's mother are totally modern in their words and affect. Doug Hutchinson is baldly doing an imitation of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. A guy gets set on fire and it only makes his flesh more smooth and moist. Mauler is established as a super-Ninja ass kicker only to have Malone defeat her while remaining tied up in a chair. We're shown numerous different scenarios of how Malone's family was killed and they're simultaneously played for humor and drama. A bad guy changes to a good guy with a one sentence explanation out of nowhere.

The opening gun fight is extremely well done and the "cartoon noir" stylings of the film are amusing at first, but Give 'em Hell, Malone quickly falls into making too many obvious and easy jokes at the very noirish conventions it embraces. The humor in "cartoon noir" comes from how absurdly seriously it takes those conventions. When characters essentially start winking at the audience to let them in on the joke, all that's left is a lot of forced artificiality.

The turning point for this movie is when Malone forces a motel clerk to admit that he's part of the scheme against him…and Malone then rents a room in the motel and stays the night. Does that make any sense? Why would you stay at a place being managed by someone who could call the bad guys and let them know where you are? The clerk never does that, which only compounds how ludicrous it is, and from that moment on these filmmakers no longer cared about any sort of internal logic or consistency in their story.

Give 'em Hell, Malone is neither fish nor fowl. It never figures out why it does the things it does and gets smothered by that incomprehension. The first half isn't an utter disaster, but I can't imagine anyone sticking around 'til the end and feeling satisfied with how it turns out

Malone is a classic scotch guzzling gumshoe. He narrates during the movie in the tough guy Sam Spade style. Early in the movie he is shot and goes to a retirement home to meet his mom, a Betty White knock-off, who nonchalantly removes the bullet from his chest. He meets a dame, who is every bit as tough talking as he is. One of the guys who is trying to kill him is a pyromaniac named Matchstick, who learned to act from watching Heath Ledger as the Joker. If fact he imitated the Joker so much, it was a bit annoying. Ving Rhames is a bad guy attempting to deal with emotional issues. The plot is confused and immaterial to the movie. There is also a stereo-typical oriental female killer, who is tough. How tough? Ving asks, "Do you know where she keeps her knives?" The comedy is light but good. Simulated oral sex, very brief nudity, and drops the MF bomb.