
To her, it had been a nightmare for Jade, an animated character who was in Albuquerque, New Mexico along with her brother, Brandon, who had gone there due to the brutal murder of their parents in London. The details regarding Jade’s parents’ murder are vague. Also, it is not clear how they became members of a street gang that resulted in Jade killing her brother by accident, head-on. But for whatever reason, Jade has vowed to herself that she will never touch a gun ever again.
The audience watching the film is first taken to a scene where Jade (Shaina West, Black Widow, The Woman King) is in the house of her friend Layla (Katherine McNamara, The Arrow, Assimilate) who is unhappy to see her ad walk towards her. This is probably because she is having a baby, who will never get to know his/her father since it was due to Jade’s bullet that he/she is never going to be born.
As if that isn’t already enough for her, she is soon swept into the role of unwittingly becoming the owner of a digital drive that some dangerous men who work for Tork (Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler, Angel Heart), a businessman you expect Mickey Rourke would play, are seeking. How dangerous are these guys? These guys are pretty rough, at one point they are actually trying to physically torture a person to obtain the location of the drive. After some appropriate stumbles and nice hefty smacks to this man\’s knees, his face is burnt with the juice of a lemon! Dude tries to break out of that kind of pain and all they dispatch him.
Originally announced in 2021 for a 2022 release, Jade was the first feature film of director James Bamford, who is primarily known as a stuntman (Deep Rising, Apollo 18), and was filmed earlier than the recently released film Air Force One Down. But why did it get the award first? The script, co-written by Bamford, Lynn Colliar, and Glenn Ennis (Gnome Alone) is to be mostly blamed for these occurrences. For one, the language employed in the dialogue leaves one’s heart to sink and even in routine speech turns out to be quite actual. Why go for six strong derogatory terms instead of twelve when in Gaelic the characters are sure to look far more menacing?
The film has this bizarre ‘feature’ where it can’t make up its mind if it wanted to be a pure-lead action film, an action-comedy, or some twisted hybrid between the two. In one scene, Jade comes to the end of a fight after slashing her opponent’s throat. The blood spray on the wall suddenly turns into large lettering that says “FATALITY” while a voice-over shouts it out in classic Mortal Kombat fashion. Or, as another example, a person speaks Spanish while it transcribes his speech onto a wall, as opposed to subtitling it. And even, those who enjoy seeing and counting the numbers are shown a kill count statistic on-screen above the frame.
The same is true for how the action scenes are edited too. Some of them are rather basic, allowing the fighter to show his or her moves. While others are way over the top, with rapid cuts, slow motions, and varied tempos as if they were clips of a game or music. Or it gets plain ridiculous, like when Jade has to kill someone by hurling her Afro comb at them like a shuriken.
It’s a shame because fights that Bamford simply directs and does not try to stylize tend to be okay. West most definitely has the choreography to make a decent fight scene believable, and I don’t think age has done much damage to actor Mark Dacascos (Brotherhood of the Wolf, Blade of the 47 Ronin), who plays Will’s father in a quick cameo. He is one of Jade’s parents’ friends, “THE INTERPOL that Dad said you were running a fitness club?” but it was all for nothing as all of his fight sequences were pure gimmickry.
What is there in the hard drive? As Bamford was all mad at the audience when leaving the screen stating I would never show it to the viewers or the glued concern about Jade’s brother’s demise, which was made apparent in other narratives. Cynical it was supposed to be, but instead it was just idiotic.
Thus, Jade though appears as an attempt worth consideration, it attempts more action sequences than most of its budget assured it and adds a pinch of irrelevant camera angles.
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