Four Eyes Movie Review:


Synopsis:

Paul Hunt is a trainee salesman who is seriously down on his luck. Not only has he just been liberated of £1000 after a mugging in his local park, but his nightmarish boss “Big Al” forces him to wear glasses as they make him “…look 15% more intelligent”.
He has also been ‘gifted’ with a horrendously ugly company car, and has his pregnant girlfriend constantly haranguing him about a new home for the soon - to - be expanding family.
This is a low – budget, digital feature which focuses strongly upon dialogue and exchanges between characters.

The story begins with the central character, Paul, having just been mugged, laying face down in the grass. He spends the rest of the movie being kicked down by people.

Paul’s life is utterly crap. The mugging is just one of a list of unfortunate raindrops that plop from the constant cloud above his head. But he does himself no favours, and his negative outlook stains everything he tries to achieve. He’s lazy, selfish and useless. But he never really gets a chance to be anything else as someone is always on his case.

You never really empathise with Paul, though.
Yes, his girlfriend is a nagging pain, (but she has a point, if he’s not paying the bills!), his twin brother is a gambling addict, and his boss at the double glazing firm, Big Al, is the Glaswegian representative for Satan, but at least he’s quite amusing to watch on screen.

This is a problem. The best actor plays big Al’s character, and even he’s a bit shaky at times. Paul, and the rest of the cast unfortunately, are of the non - professional variety, most of them probably chosen because they would be more authentic (as well as a fair bit cheaper). But instead of authentic, we get amateur, due to an apparent weakness in direction.

There is limited evidence of control over some aspects of the film’s dialogue, but improv doesn’t really come naturally to most of the actors, especially Paul, who has a smirk on his face even when mugged, thumped and losing everything on the g – g’s.

This comes across as the smirk of someone who is not really in character, and therefore not believable. It’s hard to take the plot seriously when it is sometimes quite obvious that the cast have been given perhaps a wisp of dialogue and told to improvise the rest. This results in scenes where the actors repeat a line several times, and are obviously trying to think of how to flesh it out as it is being said, which, when the banter is the main selling point, isn’t a great situation.

The digital, handheld method of filming actually does the movie no harm - it’s reasonably well executed, and the editing isn’t too bad, it’s just that the bare bones don’t carry for 66 minutes.

As a premise, Four Eyes could have been really amusing, but it can’t decide whether it’s meant to be funny or touching – as a result it is neither.

Terresa Gaffney

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