Too Late (Dennis Hauck, 2015) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Luke Fowler

See, this is why I think this subscriber-request lottery is turning out to be a good idea. Mr. Fowler's request, Too Late, is a film I'd never heard of, and if by chance I ever stumbled across a mention of it, I would probably have made firm plans to never watch it. It's precisely the kind of sub-Tarantino, neo-movie-brat exercise I tend to despise. And while I found quite a lot to dislike in Hauck's film, I actually found a fair amount to admire as well. Taken as a debut film, it's undeniably impressive.

Much of the difficulty stems from the fact that Hauck is working so hard to impress. It strives to be a clever present-day noir, while at the same time winking so much at its audience that it begins to look like a nervous tic. Too Late is divided into five "acts," each of which is presented in a single unbroken shot. Just to make sure we are suitably awestruck, Hauck has a Kodak logo at the beginning, letting us know that this was shot on celluloid, goddammit. 

The primary narrative tissue is the sad plight of private eye Mel Sampson (John Hawkes), who is investigating a murder that appears to have been the result of a nervous gangster Gordy (Robert Forster) being worried his wife (Vail Bloom) would find out he had an affair. He doesn't have the woman he screwed killed, though. Instead he targets Dorothy (Crystal Reed), a doe-eyed stripper who stumbled upon Polaroids of Gordy caught in the act. Because of a bit of ill-timed flirtation on the part of two scumbag drug dealers (Dash Mihok and Rider Strong), there are simultaneous murder plots, because there's the guy who actually killed her (Brett Jacobsen) and the hapless drug guys who think they did.

Did I mention that the five acts all appear out of chronological order? 

Mike D'Angelo has frequently taken a firm stand against one-shot stunt filming, and Too Late absolutely proves his point. Not everyone is Miklós Jancsó or Béla Tarr, willing to go through the painstaking rehearsals necessary to orchestrate a scene in a single take. So often, directors will settle for bad line readings or pacing problems because they just don't want to call "cut" and do it again. Too Late has some "acts" that are relatively gripping, and others that are just stupid: badly written and indifferently acted. There's almost nothing at stake here besides USC film-guy attitude. (Women are pretty much golden-hearted sex objects, and in the final minutes Hauck even drops the N-word. What a badass.) And for that reason, even the ample skill displayed in Too Late becomes a bit insulting, because it's in the service of something so stridently jejune. If Guy Ritchie and Rob Tragenza were forced at gunpoint to collaborate, it might look a lot like this -- another good argument for gun control.