An inventive and fast-paced ride that entertains, despite an unconvincing love story at the centre
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” Penelope responds. “It’s a great movie.”
“There’s a road they drive down at the end. I’d like to drive down that road.”
“Yes, it is,” I reply.
If you’ve seen the 1990s classic, you’ll know- it’s not. And neither is the road they drive down in Frank & Penelope, the action-horror exploitation and road trip romance mashup from director Sean Patrick Flanery. ..
Flanery’s new film, “Frank and Penelope,” stars Kevin Dillon and a cast of mostly fresh faces. The story kicks off with Frank, freshly heartbroken and at a loose end after catching his wife cheating, stumbling into a skeezy sex club where Penelope is performing. The beautiful young stripper immediately steals Frank’s heart- and his credit cards- before the sting goes off course and she finds herself riding shotgun on the run with the handsome stranger. ..
Frank and Penelope is a mix of influences and genres that pays homage to classic road movies. However, the duo’s hokey dialogue and series of inexplicably bad decisions make it more Dumb and Dumber than Bonnie and Clyde.
Frank and Penelope are driving through the desert on their way to a party. They have a good conversation, but Penelope starts to feel attracted to Frank. The writing is poor, and Penelope declares her feelings for Frank in the same overwrought terms she used to seduce and rob him.
Neither particularly likeable characters on their own, the combination of Frank’s meat-headed romantic with “stripper with a heart of gold” Penelope is so cloying that the introduction of murderous cannibals comes as a relief.
In the early 1900s, Quicksilver was a booming industrial hub home to America’s biggest mercury mine. But following the industry’s steep downturn over the nineteen-thirties and forties, the mine went bankrupt and Quicksilver was all but abandoned. Today, it is considered an official ghost town. ..
The setting for the film’s much improved second act is a terrific place, and Flanery makes the most of it with wide angle shots that instantly capture the strange, unsettling, and beautiful beauty of the desert’s fading sunset. “Get in and get outta there,” before “them crazy Appalachians” show up, is what County Sherriff Caulfield (Kevin Dillion) bluntly tells Frank and Penelope as they approach the forty-mile stretch of land with no cell reception. Instead, the duo immediately stop and check in for a nights’ stay at the spooky guesthouse smack bang in the middle which is owned by the “crazy Appalachians.” What could go wrong? ..
The movie’s main plot is a rapid acceleration into blood-soaked, pedal to the floor carnage that’s completely tasteless, doesn’t always make sense, and is far and away the best part of the movie.
As they take centre stage, Johnathon Schaech and Donna D’Errico are equally great as Chisos and Mabel i.e., the murderous clan’s unofficial patriarch and matriarch, both embodying the villainous roles with enough intelligence to be truly threatening. (In a particularly memorable scene which sees Frank and Penelope naively join the pair for a guesthouse family dinner, Chisos details his sin-eating practice with such quiet charm it sounds horrifyingly reasonable.) And while his screen time is brief, Keven Dillon is another of the film’s highlights, his hilariously convincing Deep South Daddy bravado amplifying the impact of Caulfield’s shock character arc.
The film has some great ideas, but the execution is not always perfect. The main problem is that the film takes a while to get going and it can be difficult to keep the viewer’s attention. This makes the film less enjoyable overall.
The film’s icky sexual politics are far too obvious and on the nose to ignore. As well as some fairly graphic depictions of violence toward women in the film, much of Frank and Penelope’s tension is wrung from an ever-present threat of rape. While not exactly new territory for the horror genre, Frank and Penelope’s hammy, almost playful approach to the subject may leave a bad taste in the mouths of some viewers. And what, in this context, are we supposed to make of Penelope flirtatiously telling a handsy Frank “Don’t ask first,” or her mantra that “If a man don’t fly into a rage he isn’t in love.”
I believe that these were attempts at irony or had some alternate, subversive meaning. But it seems clear that there was not enough thought put in, and the film fails to follow through. ..
Frank and Penelope is a movie that will either be loved or hated by viewers. It has a mixture of genres and tones, which makes it possible to switch between them on a scene-by-scene basis. However, despite its stylish visuals, talented cast, and exciting plot, the writing is ultimately poor and can grate on even the biggest fans of the film. ..
