Loanshark (2005) - By Duane L. Martin

Film Reviews: Loanshark (2005) - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Wednesday, June 01, 2005 @ 00:00:00 Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

Loanshark is the story of a thug named Teddy who acts as a loanshark slash collector for a local mobster slash businessman. Basically I could end the story of the plot right there because there's not much more to it than that.

The whole film is about Teddy going around to various people and either roughing them up or intimidating them to get the money they owe. While this in and of itself wasn't bad, I would have liked to have seen more of a serious storyline aspect to the film rather than scene after scene of him collecting from people. Now that's not to say that it didn't work at all, because in some ways, it actually did.

The film is in black and white, and the constant jumping from one encounter to the next in some ways gives it a bit of a documentary feel. There is in fact some small bit of storyline going on throughout the movie, but mostly it all just comes down to a running series of events all leading up to a final conclusion without a lot of coherence or consistency in either character or story. Teddy goes through the whole film switching back and forth between thug and semi-decent guy modes, which would have worked a little better if the thug mode had been basically just a work for the people that owed him money and not really his true personal character. The fact that he was generally just a thug really takes away from whatever sympathy the viewer might have otherwise felt for him.

For the most part, all of the actors in this film did a decent job, with just a few exceptions. Now when I say they did a decent job, that's not to say that all the acting was great on a technical acting level, but that the actors came off as real people having an interaction rather than overdramatizing everything and making it all sound rehearsed. The line delivery by nearly everyone in this film was not done as an actor would do it, but as a regular person would do it, and much of it sounded ad libbed, which added a sense of realism and enhanced the documentary feel of the film.

The technical quality of the film is a double edged sword. While many of the camera shots and angles were done really well, the editing and sound were inconsistent. With the editing, there were a lot of scenes that felt unfinished. Someone would say something and then the film would just cut away to something else before the scene felt like it had concluded. There were also some shots and scenes that either could or should have been cut out because they were simply unnecessary to the telling of the story. As far as the sound goes, it was just fine as far as the voices were concerned. I could hear everyone clearly and the quality of the vocal recording was quite good. What wasn't good however was that the background sounds would change with each edit. While this is fine when you're editing together scenes that are supposed to express a passage of time, it's not so great when you're cutting together a linear scene. I can't really fault the filmmaker for this though because there's only so much you can do with background noise short of re-recording all the voices in post and mixing in a solid background recording behind it over the edits. I don't want to sound overly nitpicky about this because it really wasn't that bad and didn't detract from the film at all.

Basically, this film feels like a documentary about the day to day life of a loanshark. On that level it works and if you approach it at that level, you'll enjoy it a lot more than if you go into it expecting some big dramatic action movie. I can tell that filmmaker Jay Jennings spent a lot of time setting up shots and trying to make a visually cool movie with an interesting story. The movie is visually quite nice looking, but on a story level, I'm sorry to say it comes up lacking.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, or to purchase a copy for yourself, you can visit the film's website at http://www.loansharkmovie.com.