Power of the People
Today's review: The Power of Few.
I’ll start off by saying that I like the concept of The Power of Few. In fact, for 4/5ths of the movie, I was enjoying the movie in general. The ending does bring things down massively, but that doesn’t mean the story as a whole isn’t worth talking about.
The story starts out fairly straightforward, if a little over-the-top grim. Cory (Devon Gearhart) is a teenager growing up in a poor section of town, with an uncaring mother and a sick baby brother. Said brother needs medicine, but they can’t afford it, so Cory steals a gun from his uncle and heads to a nearby store. After what seems to be random asides featuring two government agents of some description and two homeless guys, Cory reaches the store and, after initially hesitating, pulls the gun on the cashier. He gets the items he wanted, but then gets shot (and shoots in turn) the other owner of the store. And then…the story jumps back to a little earlier in the day, when a courier named Alexa (Q’orianka Kilcher) picks up a package from a shady looking man, before running into Dom (Jesse Bradford) who’s on the run from some thugs. That’s when you realize what’s going on here; we’re getting multiple stories that overlap with each other, each new story retroactively fleshing out the others. Pretty much everyone who gets screentime in the first part gets time to shine over the course of the movie, all of it culminating in a multi-part tragedy. All this and there’s some religion and philosophy mixed up in there too.
As I said in the introduction, the structure of this movie is pretty neat. I like the previous stories being recontextualized, as well as the little glimpses of the stories popping up in the new ones, while wondering what will become relevant in the upcoming ones. Some of them are stronger (or more ridiculous) than others, but the overall presentation is very solid. Then the final story comes along and messes up everything. Without spoiling things, it completely contradicts everything we’ve seen before, and not in a cool twist kind of way. It’s also not entirely as happy for some of the characters as it might appear. From a philosophical perspective, I get what they were doing, but it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie and mostly seems to exist for a bit of writerly self-indulgence. I think there would have been a way to make this work while also being true to everything that came before. But of course, hindsight is 20/20.
While the ending is the big issue and the structural layout will probably be too confusing or pretentious for some people, there are some smaller issues worth mentioning. The story about the two agents, Marti (Nicky Whelan) and Clyde (Christian Slater) is way too over the top. While the other stories are mostly grounded in reality, this story features an agent that takes cocaine, what appears to be hypnotism, and torture that I’d almost say is played for laughs. I’d have accepted Hollywood creative liberties in the portrayal of agents tracking and apprehending a potential terrorist agent, but none of that can be taken seriously. The story about the two bums Brown (Jordan Prentice) and Doke (Christopher Walken, who I get the impression has spent most of his later acting years taking roles like this that allow him to be weird) is also a bit implausible, but at least that one can be justified by Doke not being quite right in the head. You may also find one of the central plot points to be ridiculous, but I personally was willing to suspend my disbelief over it. And while this last one isn’t a huge deal, Q’orianka Kilcher’s name pops up as an actress, producer, and singer of the end credit song, suggesting that this may either be a vanity project or involve some nepotism. She did not, however, have anything directly to do with the script, so I’m not going to rail against it. No, I’ll save my dissatisfaction for writer/director Leone Marucci instead.
While the ending does make me a little hesitant to recommend the movie, I do think it’s interesting enough to be worth checking out. Maybe just stop after Doke and Brown’s story and assume things came to a more understandable conclusion. As for me, I may try to find other movies that have this sort of structure. It’s an interesting type of storytelling that I’d like to encourage in my own small way.
I’ll start off by saying that I like the concept of The Power of Few. In fact, for 4/5ths of the movie, I was enjoying the movie in general. The ending does bring things down massively, but that doesn’t mean the story as a whole isn’t worth talking about.
The story starts out fairly straightforward, if a little over-the-top grim. Cory (Devon Gearhart) is a teenager growing up in a poor section of town, with an uncaring mother and a sick baby brother. Said brother needs medicine, but they can’t afford it, so Cory steals a gun from his uncle and heads to a nearby store. After what seems to be random asides featuring two government agents of some description and two homeless guys, Cory reaches the store and, after initially hesitating, pulls the gun on the cashier. He gets the items he wanted, but then gets shot (and shoots in turn) the other owner of the store. And then…the story jumps back to a little earlier in the day, when a courier named Alexa (Q’orianka Kilcher) picks up a package from a shady looking man, before running into Dom (Jesse Bradford) who’s on the run from some thugs. That’s when you realize what’s going on here; we’re getting multiple stories that overlap with each other, each new story retroactively fleshing out the others. Pretty much everyone who gets screentime in the first part gets time to shine over the course of the movie, all of it culminating in a multi-part tragedy. All this and there’s some religion and philosophy mixed up in there too.
As I said in the introduction, the structure of this movie is pretty neat. I like the previous stories being recontextualized, as well as the little glimpses of the stories popping up in the new ones, while wondering what will become relevant in the upcoming ones. Some of them are stronger (or more ridiculous) than others, but the overall presentation is very solid. Then the final story comes along and messes up everything. Without spoiling things, it completely contradicts everything we’ve seen before, and not in a cool twist kind of way. It’s also not entirely as happy for some of the characters as it might appear. From a philosophical perspective, I get what they were doing, but it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie and mostly seems to exist for a bit of writerly self-indulgence. I think there would have been a way to make this work while also being true to everything that came before. But of course, hindsight is 20/20.
While the ending is the big issue and the structural layout will probably be too confusing or pretentious for some people, there are some smaller issues worth mentioning. The story about the two agents, Marti (Nicky Whelan) and Clyde (Christian Slater) is way too over the top. While the other stories are mostly grounded in reality, this story features an agent that takes cocaine, what appears to be hypnotism, and torture that I’d almost say is played for laughs. I’d have accepted Hollywood creative liberties in the portrayal of agents tracking and apprehending a potential terrorist agent, but none of that can be taken seriously. The story about the two bums Brown (Jordan Prentice) and Doke (Christopher Walken, who I get the impression has spent most of his later acting years taking roles like this that allow him to be weird) is also a bit implausible, but at least that one can be justified by Doke not being quite right in the head. You may also find one of the central plot points to be ridiculous, but I personally was willing to suspend my disbelief over it. And while this last one isn’t a huge deal, Q’orianka Kilcher’s name pops up as an actress, producer, and singer of the end credit song, suggesting that this may either be a vanity project or involve some nepotism. She did not, however, have anything directly to do with the script, so I’m not going to rail against it. No, I’ll save my dissatisfaction for writer/director Leone Marucci instead.
While the ending does make me a little hesitant to recommend the movie, I do think it’s interesting enough to be worth checking out. Maybe just stop after Doke and Brown’s story and assume things came to a more understandable conclusion. As for me, I may try to find other movies that have this sort of structure. It’s an interesting type of storytelling that I’d like to encourage in my own small way.