Criminal mess – Newspaper Kommersant No. 215 (7416) dated 11/21/2022

The film production of directors Brian Watkins and Dmitry Golovin “Let’s make some noise!” (Rattled!) who Mikhail Trofimenkov considered a Tarantino Z film.

The real nerve in this kind of black, kind of gangster kind of comedy, appears only when the godfather of the Russian drug mafia in Las Vegas, Fedor Grin, played by Pavel D. Lychnikov, bursts onto the screen. Lychnikov is not exactly a great actor, but a professional with over a hundred roles behind him, including roles in Charlie Wilson’s War, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Star Trek. Roughly speaking, a professional Hollywood Russian drinking vodka straight from a samovar. In “Let’s make some noise!” he, however, civilized sucks a liter of white from the throat. But his king of cocaine with the face of a Lyubertsy gopnik of the early nineties suppresses small-scale screen bandits with his presence in the same way as any strong artisan suppresses relaxed child actors who decide to play bandits.

The largest film site IMDB, unable to report anything intelligible about the Russian co-director of the film, Dmitry Golovin, who, obviously, should not be confused with the famous basketball player, at the same time colorfully paints the life path of Pavel D. Lychnikov. The path of the actor, who flew to America according to all the canons of emigrant mythology with five dollars in his pocket and five English words in his language, ran from Brighton Beach and Harlem to Hollywood. A kind of metaphor for the genre nature of the film “Let’s make some noise!”, hovering somewhere halfway between the aesthetic preferences of the Brighton Beach people of the nineties and the gloomy ideas of Californian producers who are far from being the first row to stir up something a la the early Quentin Tarantino.

However, “a la” is too intelligently said. Watkins and Golovin fearlessly twist the motives of Tarantino’s great crime films, just as fearlessly vulgarizing them. If Pulp Fiction featured a God-chosen killer played by Samuel L. Jackson, Let’s Make Some Noise! Eliot (Nicholas D’Agosto), a fresh-baked priest, has crept into a gang of clumsy gangsters. The “nerd” in an ironed cassock also quotes the Bible at the most inopportune moments, but most of all he is afraid that his mother, when she returns home, will kick his ears for the mess in the house.

The disorder in the house means abundant blood stains and the cut-off tongue of a character that Elliot and his comrades abducted by mistake, not understanding the slurred instructions sent to them by Fedor. The instructions, we note, are by no means more vague than the script itself.

To understand where the motif of the tongue cut off from the hostage by the nervous gopnik Gus (Goya Robles) came from, you should not go to a fortune teller. Who doesn’t remember the scene of cutting off the ear of a hostage policeman in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. That’s just self-mutilation, which Tarantino looked like a monstrous and majestic ritual, the authors of “Let’s make some noise!” causes nothing but sincere, physiological disgust. A disgust that reaches almost cosmic heights when the severed tongue begins to literally get under the feet of the characters.

At the same time, obviously, the original intention of the authors was naive and deceptively simple: to make a crime comedy about a gang of idiots. Idiot Fedor gets idiot Wolfe (Jared Abrahamson) out of jail to stage a kidnapping. Wulff, who can’t wait to romp with charming Chinese Harper (Jessica Wang) during work hours, entrusts the matter to idiot Gus. Gus, in turn, recruits the idiot Elliot. Eliot enlists his sniper grandfather King (William Frederick Knight), a senile Vietnam veteran, to the cause.

The idea of ​​making fun of a Vietnam veteran half a century after the end of the bloodiest war in recent American history doesn’t seem entirely ethical in itself. Unlike, say, Iraq, this was not a punitive operation, but a real national tragedy. OK. Grandpa rolls around on a children’s scooter, always forgets to put the safety on his trusty rifle and does not leave the house without a helmet.

Where did the helmet come from, obviously. The authors pulled it off the head of the insane composer from Mel Brooks’ brilliant comedy The Producers (1968), who wrote the worst musical in history, Spring for Hitler. When King, having exactly hit the target for the only time in the film, and, of course, not at all the one he intended to hit, satisfactorily makes a notch on the butt, saying “fifty-first”, it remains only to shrug. Dmitry Golovin, of course, studied at a Soviet school and remembered Boris Lavrenev’s short story “Forty-First”: under such a number was the “belyak” shot by her from the Red Guard Maryutka.

In general, the name of the film “Let’s make some noise!” fully justified itself. Well, Watkins and Golovin made some noise, yelled to their heart’s content, spilled liters of cranberry juice, vodka and vomit on the audience, juggled their severed ears. And the feeling from the film remains as from a bad hangover after a party with a massacre that went awry and awry: what was it all about.