Expired

This film tries to be deep and meaningful with a distinct Blade Runner skyline interspersed with real, busy street scenes. It just fails to ignite, the story isn't clear, Weaving is under used and the male lead has to be the most scruffy, miserable SOB i've ever come across.

His mumbling frustrates as do the extended scenes where nothing happens, without even minimal (poor) dialogue to break it up.

The girl has the sort of face that'll get work and , no doubt she can act.

Hugo was doing his bit for Oz, that's fair enough, the other two leads need to dust themselves off and try again.

The pacing is excruciatingly slow. The movie has very little dialog, plot or action. Kwanten talks in a half whisper both in his voice-over and dialog. It's really quite a boring movie. It shares a lot of characteristics with Lost in Translation.

My verdict - pass

If you decide to watch it and you happen to play it on VLC video player on Windows then run it at 108% speed.

I was looking forward to this film as I very much enjoyed Mystery Road and Goldstone. (It seems it has been released as Expired rather than the current 'Loveland' title here on imdb.)

As a sci-fi film it is clearly somewhat hamstrung by a lack of budget. You get a couple of distant shots of a futuristic city but then all the filming of the cast are just on the street, 'today'. Nobody dresses any different, the cars and streets are all unchanged, its slighlty jarring. There are a lot of people walking around with umbrellas up, even though its not raining. I can only guess the plan was to cgi some of these sequences but maybe the money ran out.

That aside when it starts it is really difficult to hear the lead actor. He speaks so quietly and is way down in the mix so that you can't hear what he is saying about half of the time. Most of the (long) opening narration is inaudible and throughout the film it's often a struggle to make out his dialogue. Its somewhat ironic all the Chinese cast, who speak clearly, are subtitled where it is the lead who really needs it.

Its a very slow film and there really isn't much in the way of story. There is no chemistry at all between the two leads either so it was ultimately not very interesting. I made it to the end hoping there would be something more but then it ended.

It seems to want to be a kind of mash-up between Paris, Texas and Blade Runner but its like thats as far as the idea went.

Honestly I didn't mind watching this film, but with the talent he had and the clearly substantial budget, it was unfortunate in many ways. Aside from the almost painfully unoriginal nature of the story, I just kept thinking one thought over and over. A middle-aged man, a young beautiful woman and an older man. How many times have I seen this same scenario? Too many.

It's an ambitious task producing a science fiction movie on an obviously low budget, especially if the content focuses on condition rather than plot.

The movie's cinematography is well worth watching, also editing is well made, but without a straight plot, scripting has to carry a heavy load because every scene has to stand for itself. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up to the task. Though the dialogues seek philosophical depth, they lack refinement, constantly throwing me out of the suspension of disbelief.

Acting is just fine, including that of Ryan Kwanten who plays the lead role of Jack. However, his sloppy diction is hard to take. Eager to be as authentic as possible, he sacrifices his control over speech which makes him simply hard to understand.

Also, there are too many references to "Blade Runner": A lonesome killer seeking love, voiceover narration, androids, the lifespan issue, an Asian future city, even the soundtrack that sounds like Vangelis at times - there are just too many parallels.

Great Hong Kong footage, good editing, but overall an overambitious undertaking.