Pixie, in particular, is a mystifying failure as a character, failing to radiate the dangerous levels of va-voom that would justify the way other characters describe her. They're mainly just there to say supposedly clever lines and do supposedly outrageous things. But it's difficult to care because neither the director nor the screenwriter seem terribly invested in the characters as actual people with a life force (something that's true of Tarantino and Richie's characters even when they're being glib and coasting on their usual shtick). There's a convoluted backstory involving Pixie's family that weaves through the film and pays off, sort of, at the end. The Irish accents and landscapes and plentiful Catholic iconography (including a ring of gangsters posing as priests, as if the Church didn't already have enough problems) suggest that the film is channeling Martin or John Michael McDonagh as well as Tarantino. But really, there isn't a single non-derivative element to be seen anywhere in the film, save for the widescreen cinematography by French-born John de Borman, which captures natural light and textures with a fine art photographer's sense of presence. The bulk of the rest of the film follows Pixie and two local fellas, Frank ( Ben Hardy) and Harland ( Daryl McCormack), as they travel around the country, getting twisted up in bloody shenanigans at the behest of Pixie, who needs to reset the local criminal/karmic scales after that disastrous robbery. But the crime goes wrong, as robberies often do. She wants to go to art school in San Francisco and, in the opening sequence, sets up both her current and ex-lovers in a robbery to acquire enough money for the trip. Pixie is a heartbreaker, famed by the lads for her beauty, and rumored to take erotic photographs. Olivia Cooke stars as the title character, a twenty-something local gal who happens to be the stepdaughter of a local gangster ( Colm Meaney) who also has two other stepchildren, one of whom-Pixie's stepbrother Mickey ( Turlough Convery) hates her so much that their every interaction is marinated in impending violence. This would seem self-deprecating if the movie had even an iota of its own identity save for the regionalisms. ![]() It checks every item on the wishlist. There's even a big title card after the opening teaser playfully renaming this story ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRELAND. Considering that Tarantino's films were themselves pastiches-referencing earlier movies in every scene-the photocopying seemed even more pointless.ĭirected by " Wayne's World" and " Spice World" producer Barnaby Thompson, and written by his son Preston, "Pixie" feels as if it arrived via time-warp from about 1998, most likely on a VHS cassette with a "CLEARANCE" sticker on the slipcase. For every Guy Ritchie (" Snatch") who benefited from the Tarantino after-boom, dozens more directors did a wheelie or two in this cul-de-sac of cinema history and were promptly forgotten. ![]() They had soundtracks of groovy retro or retro-flavored music pop culture-laden dialogue and monologues, delivered by gangsters, drug dealers, thieves, hitmen, molls, crooked boxers, and the like storytelling that jumped around in time and graphic violence and torture played for belly laughs. Gather 'round, children. There was a period from roughly the mid-1990s through the early aughts when the success of " Pulp Fiction" sent every distributor, large and small, on a treasure hunt across Hollywood and overseas, searching for scripts that looked, sounded, and felt like a Quentin Tarantino film, or like their most superficial version of what one was. ![]() And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it." The crime comedy "Pixie" dissolves in the mind as you're watching it.
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