Rogue Cinema - Stratagem (2008) - By Duane L. Martin

Stratagem (2008) - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Wednesday, October 01 @ Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

Nathan Maddox (Bill Elverman) and Daniel Mayhee (Evan Elliot) are government contracted secret police types on the trail of escaped convict Maven Teleza (Amber Bollinger), who just happens to also be a master magician and escape artist.

Maven was convicted of killing her husband by switching the blades in one of their illusions. The blades were supposed to be rubber, and she even checked and confirmed they were rubber, but when they did the illusion, the blades were real and her husband was chopped to bits. She was convicted of killing him. She ends up hooking up with the agents, one of whom is a company man who insists on returning her, and the other who has feelings for her and wants to help her, and in the end, help himself by disappearing with her and escaping the company, which never lets its agents leave without killing them because of what they know.

There are a series of man-trap buildings and structures that hold the key to Maven discovering a hidden truth, and also to the disappearance of an agent from the company who was killed in one of the traps. Together, they must discover the secret, and try to survive long enough to finish off the bad guy and escape together to start a new life somewhere far off where no one can ever find them again.

That's the long and the short of it. Honestly, I didn't really understand what was going on. Even when you get to the end and things become more clear, you still wonder why the guy would have gone through the literally MASSIVE time, effort and expense to build all these elaborate traps and robots and everything just to lead the girl to him so he could blow up the building they were in, and thus die together. The reason he did it was because her father stole the only woman he ever loved from him, and now he wanted to steal something he loved from him. All I could think was, wouldn't it have been easier just to walk up to her on the street and shoot her? I mean, you could literally spent a billion dollars or more putting together all the elaborate crap this guy put together to kill her. The whole thing didn't make any sense.

Something else that didn't help was that parts of the dialogue were recorded so low that it was hard to make out what people were saying. Certain areas had natural environment sounds and reverb that made it even harder to understand. Much of the movie was fine, but because there were parts here and there that were hard to hear, it made it hard to follow what was going on as the story developed. Something else that made it hard to follow is that certain things were never really explained all that well, and some things just didn't make a whole lot of sense. The thing is, some elements of the film made sense just fine, which fortunately sort of carried the rest of the film along.

The acting in the film was pretty decent. This film suffered somewhat from what I referenced in my One-Day Seminar review as RRR (read, rehearsed and recited) dialogue. Some of the dialogue was ok and pretty natural, yet other bits sounded really "recited". The physical acting, especially on the part of Amber Bollinger was quite good. It's gotta be hard to act in front of a green screen, but she did a very good job of it, making it all look quite believable. The fact that she's super hot didn't hurt matters either. Not that that has anything to do with anything, but I just thought I'd mention it because I'm a guy and I notice things like that.

There's a LOT of CGI in this film. The CGI is by no means Hollywood quality, but is quite good for an independent film. Some bits of it look better than other bits. Some of it is great (like the big robot at the end) and some isn't so great. The amount of time and effort put into the CGI work in this film should be commended. I can't even imagine how long it took to do it and coordinate it all with the actions of the actors on the green screens, but man, that had to be a LOT of work.

What we end up with is a pretty decent film with characters you can actually feel something for. Some you care about, some you don't like at all. The biggest problem is that the script could have used some more work on it before it went into production to sort of iron out the kinks and work things out so they made more sense. Still, all in all it was a generally good film and well worth your time to check it out.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, you can check out it's page on the Dean Labs website at http://stratagem.deanlabs.com.