It’s never pleasant to sit through a local feature film and realize that it’s failing on almost every conceivable level. I’d love to be able to say that Las Vegan Malcolm Brooks, who wrote, produced and directed Heroes (which plays for one week at the Galaxy Neonopolis), has created an accomplished or even mildly interesting movie, but the best I can offer is that he generally keeps his actors in frame and lights them properly (well, most of the time).

The Details

Blindness

Tezz Yancey, Shott Brown, Sean Newman

Directed by Malcolm Brooks

Rated R

Opens Friday, October 3

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From the Archives

A few words with local filmmaker Malcolm Brooks (10/2/08)

The plot is generic action-movie stuff: After his nephew is gunned down in the crossfire of a drug-related shooting, ex-soldier Joshua (Yancey) recruits two friends to help him take down the people responsible. Although this sounds like Steven Seagal territory, Joshua is actually a devout Christian, and the movie is full of asides about the power of faith (there’s a scene in which Joshua lectures on abstinence to a group of teens who have no bearing on the plot and are never seen again).

The acting is mostly terrible, the dialogue is full of clumsy exposition, the plot mechanics are hard to follow, the sound design is dismal, the special effects are pathetic, and the laughable third-act twist comes out of nowhere. Brooks seems to want to make an uplifting film about doing the right thing, but all he’s done is ineptly cobble together a bunch of hoary vigilante clichés and pair them with some dubious sermonizing. At least those cheapo local horror movies are sometimes fun to sit through.