Opening Friday, December 12th
Cast:
Kim Basinger as Della
Lukas Haas as Chuckie
Craig Sheffer as Kenneth
Jamie Starr as Huey
Leonard Wu as Vingh
Luis Chávez as Tomás
Directed by Susan Montford
Review:
“Kim Basinger’s First Blood” would have been an apropos alternative title for Susan Montford’s directorial debut as it finds the actress, still looking incredibly hot, roughing it in the wild, executing her pursuers one by one and learning that killin’ comes easy. Driven by survival and ingenuity, her weapons are not firearms but whatever she can muster up from her red toolbox; the deaths she exacts are grisly and mostly involving some form of neck or head trauma. She’s Della, the suburban housewife Rambo. It sounds silly, but it’s not. Punctuated by these moments of violence, While She Was Out plays less like a Lifetime thriller and more like a slice of ’70s revenge fare.
Montford here adapts and expands a short story by Ed Bryant – always an unenviable task when said story is a few pages in length – but Montford does a deft job of fleshing out the narrative. She carries it predominantly on the shoulders of Basinger’s Della, a tired mother of two with an asshole husband (cue Craig Sheffer, Hollywood’s omnipresent go-to guy for playing assholes) who, on Christmas Eve, wipes away the tears of recent fight, puts the kids to sleep, sets out cookies and milk and ventures out of her well-to-do neighborhood and to the mall. On arrival, she’s greeted with the chaos of last-minute shoppers and along the way leaves a passive aggressive note on a car parked in two spaces. Later, she’s confronted in the lot by the owners of the car, a group of thugs led by Chuckie (Lukas Haas). When he kills an intervening mall cop, Della becomes a witness to the crime and flees the scene with Chuckie and his gang in pursuit. They track Della across rugged terrain (through a housing development and into the woods) while she fights for her life, resorting to any means necessary.
The glue that holds this picture together is the joint effort of Basinger’s performance and Montford’s confident eye. They make the flow involving, Basinger especially as she essays a role that is minimal on dialogue. Montford graces her with a satisfying arc that finds the actress transforming from a jumpy mess of a wife who cowers before her verbally abusive husband into manipulative, assured killer. At first you might bemoan Della’s decision to carry a toolbox – which could rattle at any given moment and give away her position as she flees – but at the end of the day, you’re glad she did. The tools inside are implemented for some crafty deaths, but the best one comes via an accident during a chase through a housing development.
Where the film slips and slides is in the casting of Lukas Haas and his racially mixed posse (everyone is represented here). First, it’s hard to buy Haas as a bad-ass of any type. Here he’s the leader of the pack, a pistol-wielding slender punk who talks tough and bosses his boys around. As a group leader, he’s not convincing and as a threat to Della, these would-be wolves are more like a pack of cubs.
At just over 80 minutes, While She Was Out is lean, it can be mean (not nearly enough so), but the story isn’t as gripping as it should’ve been. You roll with the punches, wishing it took more risks. And even though the film ends on an amusing note, it’s still an average cat-and-mouse game. A decent effort on Montford’s part; I’d like to see her now tackle material that hasn’t been tread many times before.
