Sadistic, sleazy gangster story with occasional quirky touches.

barnabyrudge

On the whole Prime Cut is a pretty incoherent film. The story wallows in sleaziness and trashiness, the plot makes little sense, the action set pieces are not really linked together with a meaningful narrative, and there seems to be a gratuitous level of violence and nudity. My first instinct upon watching it was to give it a 1-out-of-10 rating and try to erase it from my memory as swiftly as possible. But the more I thought about the film, the more its guilty pleasures began to win me over. Prime Cut is still trash and still a bad film - I'm not saying otherwise - but it has occasional quirky touches that make it enjoyably bad. And no-one was ever quite as good at playing the tough guy than the archetypal Lee Marvin, whose performance here boosts my rating all the way up to a generous 4!

Chicago hired killer Nick Devlin (Lee Marvin) is sent down to Kansas to deal with a crook who has let power go to his head and stolen money from his Mob bosses - 500 grand, in fact. When he arrives, Devlin discovers that his target, the bizarrely named Mary Ann (Gene Hackman), is running criminal operations from his farm that include murder, narcotics and even human cattle trading (he's selling young girls as sex slaves). Already three Chicago hit-men have fallen foul of Mary Ann in their quest to bring him to heel - the last being turned into sausages, literally, and mailed back to Chicago. Now Devlin must take up the unenviable task of stopping Mary Ann in his tracks. Devlin enrages Mary Ann by freeing one of his human "slaves", the young Poppy (Sissy Spacek). In retribution, Mary Ann pulls out all the stops to have Devlin and his back-up crew killed. Both sides suffer losses before Devlin and Mary Ann finally come face-to-face at the latter's isolated farm.

Prime Cut is definitely a unique film, though that doesn't particularly mean it's good. The characters are intentionally presented as oddballs which makes them initially interesting, though the effect starts to wear thin as the film progresses. The Kansas countryside provides a colourful backdrop and creates a strong contrast with the dark characters and plot. The film really comes undone when one tries to follow its narrative, for it is so fast-paced and scattershot that it barely makes a shred of sense. Also, the characters are frustratingly under-developed (this is a rare example of a film that isn't overlong but, if anything, UNDERlong!!) I wanted to know more about Marvin's past; I wanted more scenes featuring Hackman's depraved villain; I wanted more to be made of Angel Tompkins' gangster's moll character; and I definitely wanted the climactic shootout to have a more satisfying pay-off. Prime Cut has cult potential, but it's more of a curious misfire than anything else.

score 4/10

barnabyrudge 20 December 2005

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1242846/