Critically and publicly panned, the flirtatious and fun-looking VIOLET & DAISY could have been so much more. It is filled with so much joy and (that word again) fun – for a flick centred around a pair of violent little minxes – but unfortunately nails itself to the cross due to some cliché-ridden character errors and a little overcooking.
Critically and publicly panned, the flirtatious and fun-looking VIOLET & DAISY could have been so much more. It is filled with so much joy and (that word again) fun – for a flick centred around a pair of violent little minxes – but unfortunately nails itself to the cross due to some cliché-ridden character errors and a little overcooking.
The plot is basically thus: Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) play a pair of gum-cracking teenage assassins who casually – and often amusingly - snuff out crime figures in New York City, distracted only by the fact that a concert by their favourite pop star Barbie Sunday has suddenly been cancelled. Determined to raise cash for some Barbie Sunday dresses, the duo takes on a new hit job targeting a mysterious loner (the always incredible James Gandolfini, RIP) who leads them into an unexpected odyssey of self-examination and catapults the junior enforcers into a world beyond Barbie and bullets for pay.
Sounds like a fun premise, yeah? Unfortunately Gandolfini's quietly magnificent performance (aren’t they all though, seriously) is one of the few redeeming features in the thriller, which seems so heavily influenced by the work of Tarantino and the like that it becomes a caricature rather than a solid homage.
I admit that I was expecting to be seriously wowed when I found out that the film’s writer-director was Geoffrey Fletcher, who came to everyone’s attention when he penned the screenplay for the wonderful PRECIOUS. It seems that when you win an Oscar however, you get to revisit a pet project - and his was clearly VIOLET & DAISY. At times the actors, director and screenplay really spark to life though, and hey, the cast also includes Danny Trejo – who, like Gandolfini, can pretty much make a movie in my opinion.
Sadly these moments are fleeting though, and at times the movie even starts to almost resemble a live action movie of a Japanese Manga-style cartoon, with cheeky schoolgirls in slightly too sexy get ups plying hopscotch and sucking on lollipops. The assassins are young, beautiful women whose blank-faced sweetness is a cover for their rather soulless acts of violence, but they are also curiously one-dimensional for characters that act so outrageously in their day-to-day lives. I wanted to know more about how they ended up living their lives as they do, and to see the cracks in their veneer go a little deeper.
The film is in my opinion rather over-art directed too, with clichés even extending to their apartment, which looks like what would happen if you entered “cute, vintage” into a Pinterest search and watched it slowly come to life.
Don’t be totally put off by my rave though as it is a fun little film – it just could have been so much more than it is, especially given the level of talent thrown into the mix both on screen and behind the scenes.