13 Sins

2014 horror movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A guy gets a phone call and finds himself in the center of some sick game where he has to complete these increasingly reprehensible challenges.

A co-worker recommended this one. The premise is interesting although you are forced to suspend disbelief more than any person should have to in order to fully enjoy anything that's going on. The whole thing felt a little Saw-ish, not necessarily in the good way that some of you might expect. Or is there a good way to feel Saw-ish? I did appreciate that there was a darkly comic tone in some sequences although the overall tone was a little all over the place with this one. There's an intriguing opener with an old man reading dirty limericks, and you learn that you can get away with poetry about a bear wiping his ass with a rabbit but should never go near the word "twat" unless you want trouble. The guy who played the lead (Mark Webber) wasn't bad and I really liked Tom "What do you think? I gotta piss like a race horse" Bower as the guy's father. Ron Perlman though? I'm not sure what he's doing? It's like he accidentally stumbled into the movie and decided to just be a character or something. What really brings this down is the performance of Devon Graye as the main character's mentally-challenged brother. I think people playing mentally-challenged characters might be a movie pet peeve of mine. Isn't it just tacky? Graye overdoes things. There's general silliness but the pace helps it all fly by and there are some good ideas sprinkled in there. I do sort of wish the main character's conflict would have been more of an internal one. After a while, it all has more to do with blackmail than his greed or anything like that. The character was the wrong kind of desperate.

This is a remake of a Thai film called 13: Game of Death which I wouldn't mind checking out.