If
they hadn’t become corrupt cops, Michael Logan and his team probably would have
been football hooligans. Unfortunately, there probably isn’t enough time for
the husky louts to go less crooked. Karma will be harsh to some in Gerard
Johnson’s Hyena (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York, following its U.S. premiere at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.
After
plundering a large quantity of cocaine in a night club shake down, Logan’s team
is in the mood to party. That is often the case, but this time Logan has bigger
fish to fry. He has a meeting with his partner in a new Turkish drug trafficking
scheme. This is not an undercover operation. It’s an investment.
Inconveniently, Logan secretly witnesses the psychotic Albanian Kabashi Brothers
murdering his contact. At least Logan manages to secure their first shipment.
The Kabashis will be looking for that.
Things
will steadily go from bad to worse for Logan. Initially, he tries to forge a
temporary working arrangement with the Kabashi Brothers, but nobody believes
that will last. He also must contend with an Internal Affairs investigation,
while his mates become increasingly erratic and drug-addled. Seriously, how
hard could it be to bust these knuckleheads?
Yes,
we have seen this all before—and we’ve seen it better. The opening sequence is
a stylistic tour-de-force, but from there on Gerard is indecisively torn
between old school exploitation movies and affected art cinema. To a large
extent, you can determine a film’s pretentiousness by comparing the amount of screen
time devoted to the back of the protagonist’s head as they grimly trudge onward
versus more conventional (and engaging) frontal and profile shots. In Hyena, the ratio is nearly one-to-one,
which means tough sledding.
When
we can actually see his face, Peter Ferdinando is pretty good as Logan.
Likewise, Ben Wheatley regular Neil Maskell is obviously on comfortable ground as
Logan’s sleazebag subordinate, Martin. His Kill List co-star MyAnna Buring also brings some verve to the film as Logan’s
exasperated girlfriend, Lisa. Inexplicably, cult favorite Mem Ferda is almost
completely wasted in what is effectively a cameo as Turkish crime lord Akif
Dikman. Like Buddy Sorrell on the old Dick
Van Dyke Show, he spends most of his screen time lying on a couch. Yet, he
is still cool.
