I went onto Amazon the other night to look for a good film. Unfortunately, I’m a hopeless cheapskate, and I saw that there was a formulaic action movie with Guy Pearce available on the “free” list, so I ended up watching that instead.
“Disturbing The Peace” is a 2020 “thriller” which appears to have had a budget of whatever it costs to get Guy Pearce, plus some change that was between the cushions of the producer’s couch. It opens with two police officers chasing a guy on foot. Except that whoever plays the fleeing suspect isn’t much of a runner, so you can see the actor playing the cop having to awkwardly slow down in order to avoid catching him.
This perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the movie.
Guy Pearce and his partner, the two cops in question, catch up to the suspect, but he overpowers the partner character and holds him hostage. Guy Pearce tries to shoot the bad guy, but misses and hits his partner in the neck. Logic might dictate that if you shoot someone in the neck, you’re probably going to hit the person stood behind them clutching said neck against their chest, but don’t dwell on it too much. Guy takes a second shot and kills the bad guy.
Ten years later, Guy Pearce is a small town Sheriff who has sworn off using a gun since maiming his partner. His idyllic life in Horse Cave, Kentucky is about to be turned upside down, however, by a curiously multi-ethnic biker gang. There’s no joke there, the town is actually called Horse Cave, and the movie was really filmed there as a number of shots show the American Cave Museum, which is a real attraction. I Googled it.
We also get a scene in the local Diner, and there’s no way to explain this better than just transcribing my actual train of thought as we get a quick shot of The Woman in this film. My exact thoughts went as follows:
Brain: Shit, is that Toni Collette? No, just looked a bit like her for a- IS THAT FUCKING HITLER?!
It would have been weird enough to just have a background Hitler, but it turns out that this guy has lines! He’s the acting mayor ahead of the upcoming election, which, frankly, seems like a bigger problem to worry about than the group of bikers who are up to no good.
Speaking of the bikers, they consist of their blonde, blue eyed leader, a mixed race guy, and an actor of Pacific island heritage who delivers all of his lines in Spanish, so I guess we’re meant to think he’s Mexican. I’m not sure if it’s us or the movie that’s being racist at this point.
Normally, biker gangs tend to be pretty monochromatic, but my working theory is that these are just stunt performers as the production couldn’t afford to hire actors AND people willing to get thrown through a window, so they made do by having the latter double as the former. It makes for a slightly unconvincing group of bikers - not the Sons of Anarchy so much as maybe Anarchy’s Estranged Nephews. Or maybe Petulant Teenage Sons of Your New Girlfriend By Her First Husband… Of Anarchy.
One of the bikers goes to the local diner and starts trouble, and we get our first fight scene in which The Woman Character turns out to be some sort of karate expert. It’s actually a nice surprise, as a story beat, but it’s hampered somewhat by the movie’s sound department, which seems to have taken a vow of silence. Or at least be stuck working in a library, somewhere. They use the sound of an Autumn leaf falling onto grass for a punch effect, and music so quiet that I’m not sure they didn’t steal the entire soundtrack by surreptitiously taping the rehearsal of a band next door.
In the middle of this weirdly quiet brawl, Guy Pearce turns up and arrests the biker. He then sends his deputy to take the prisoner to the county jail, while he stands guard in town in case the other bikers turn up for revenge.
The other bikers, it turns out, are setting a series of traps for local law enforcement. One of them lays on the road pretending to be injured and then kidnaps the deputy when he gets out to investigate. The other bikers speed past a cop in their van and then shoot him when he pulls them over. A third group goes and destroys the town’s phone antenna, meaning that these nefarious motorcycle enthusiasts have gotten rid of the law and cut the town off from the outside world. They then ride into Horse Cave and take everyone hostage.
By “everyone” I mean about a dozen extras, including Mayor Hitler and The Woman. Horse Cave has a population of about two thousand, but according to the script this is everyone. The biker gang then go and rob the bank. It turns out that aside from the bank, they’re also planning to rob the armoured truck that picks up the bank’s money, because it has just come from a casino and as such is loaded with cash.
We know the armoured truck is coming from a Casino because we have a scene in which a hot, sexy casino girl is hit on by the cash-in-transit guard. Except that they didn’t have enough money for Guy Pearce and either of those things, so instead someone’s grandma filled in and the truck guard is played by a guy whose backstory is - I’m guessing - that he wouldn’t let his crippling autism get in the way of becoming an actor.
Honestly, this kid is hitting on Casino Grandma with all the flirtatious charm of a book of paint samples. I’ve seen vending machines put more emotion into a line reading. When the director met this kid, he fired the effects team for wasting so much time building a barely convincing robot when they should have been working.
Anyway, he gets shot when they arrive in Horse Cave, so that’s something. Of course, the biker gang that has robbed everyone and taken the town hostage didn’t reckon on Sheriff Guy P- …oh, no, they’ve captured him too. Okay.
Fortunately, one of the locals is hiding in the bed of his truck with a rifle and opens fire on Diablo and his men. Yes, the leader of the bikers is named Diablo, which is one step up from the script just referring to him as “Put Scary Name Here Later.” As long as we’re introducing the bad guys, I think we should talk about my favourite character in the whole film: Angry Two Guns Mexican.
Angry Two Guns Mexican is a fat Mexican guy played by an actor from Tahiti who spends the entire film waving two guns around in different directions and scowling directly at the camera. He’s fucking awesome.
There’s a fun trick in stunt work where people who are going to have to get hit in the head, but who aren’t playing named characters, wear huge wigs with padding under them in order to cushion the blow. The audience don’t really see enough of them to notice and it makes the job easier, but if you ever see a henchman with big hair, it’s a safe bet that something disastrous is going to happen to their skull.
Angry Two Guns Mexican has turned up to the heist wearing THAT wig and headscarf combo. You could drop a bowling ball off the roof onto this guy and he wouldn’t feel it. I decided to watch this movie until I found out what kind of absolute catastrophe they planned for this guy’s head. He’s also wearing oven gloves, for no discernable reason, so I was excited to see where that was going.
The local resident opening fire on the gang gives Guy Pearce and his deputy a chance to beat up their captors. Guy steals one biker’s shotgun and they run off, but Guy immediately throws the gun in a dumpster. He then spends ten minutes booby-trapping the police station while the bikers lure out and unconvincingly murder the sniper, and his wife for good measure. Then, when one of them goes to check the police station for the escaped Sheriff and his deputy, they open the door and trigger the booby trap, causing an explosion.
See, Guy Pearce isn’t against killing people violently, he just won’t do it with a gun.
Except then he goes home to get his gun.
I don’t know what they were aiming for with the “going home and getting your gun out of your sock drawer” scene, but it’s an odd beat in an action movie. Guy Pearce literally has time to go back to his house, on foot, and dig his gun out of a drawer. It’s a bit of a drag, in terms of pacing. There’s such a lull in the plot that Angry Two Guns Mexican even briefly lowers his arms.
While Guy is finding his gun, the gang blow open the cash truck using some platicene with an oven timer in it. I think we’re meant to think it’s plastic explosive, but the illusion is shattered by the fact that it’s just some plasticene with an oven timer in it. They then take all the cash, and just as an insider note to script writers from someone who used to do it: Cash-In-Transit vans don’t just keep all the money loose in big sacks in the van. Because that would be stupid.
Having taken all the loose money, Diablo reveals that they’re going to kill everyone in the town so there will be no witnesses. Which makes any audience member who’s still awake wonder why they bothered herding everyone into the church when they could have just shot the townsfolk ten minutes in. It doesn’t matter, the stage is set for the big showdown. Guy Pearce sneaks back into town with a pistol and a rifle and starts shooting at the bad guys from cover, which would be effective except that they gave him a prop rifle with a fucking cork in the end of it.
Angry Two Guns Mexican springs into action, ready to shoot in the general direction of the sniper or at anyone who might be somewhere behind him.
Diablo sends him to find and take out Guy Pearce, who is operating a one man guerilla campaign, running around town and popping up to shoot the bad guys from unexpected angles. At this point I sat forward, ready to see just what was going to happen to Angry Two Guns Mexican’s head.
Nothing. Fucking nothing. Guy Pearce kills him with a car bomb that he’s rigged up. We don’t even really see what happens aside from an explosion. Fuck you, movie. Fuck you for promising so much and delivering so little, when-
…Wait. This also means that that actor came to set in that outfit for some other reason. With the wig and the oven gloves and the scarf. It was a deliberate choice, and now I’m not even paying attention to the film because I have too many questions…
Meanwhile, at the church, Mayor Hitler has been trying to seduce The Woman, to no avail, and now that the bikers are getting ready to kill everyone, The Woman starts a girl-on-girl karate fight with The Woman Biker. They wrestle over a gun, the barrel of which is clearly pointed at the heroine, then we cut to outside the church and hear a shot. Then another. These are probably the only gunshots in the movie that are at a semi-correct volume - the rest of the gunfights are much quieter than the dialogue, contrary to any lived experience you may have of conversations or gunfire. Then the church door bursts open and our heroine has emerged victorious, somehow. She frees the hostages, and then goes home to get her gun.
Yup. We’re at the climax of the movie and we have ANOTHER scene of someone going home to get their gun, despite having already had access to a working gun. The Woman then gets on her horse and rides back to town, where Guy Pearce is taking on the last few bikers with his six gun despite the fact that they are spraying his entire location with an assault rifle. His clever strategy to survive this is to walk up the middle of the road firing a pistol, which somehow works great and kills everyone except Diablo.
With all of his men having been killed by very quiet guns and fake CGI blood, Diablo tries to flee with his money, and steals a motorbike. Which he then can’t start, despite “motorbikes” being his entire persona. Fortunately, the only thing more useless than Diablo trying to start a motorbike is Guy Pearce trying to reload a gun, so we have a scene that takes a very, very long time as both men struggle to complete a simple task.
Eventually, Diablo gets his bike started and tries to flee, but The Woman has arrived and given Guy Pearce her horse and rifle. If you think a chase between a horse and a motorbike would be a very one-sided affair with an obvious and immediate winner, this must be your first stupid movie.1 Guy Pearce not only keeps pace, he shoots the tyres of Diablo’s bike with a rifle from a galloping horse, which is impressive, and Diablo crashes and crawls to the kerb. He gives his standard dying bad guy speech, ending with “Is this justice?! Shooting an unarmed man?!”
At which point Guy Pearce shrugs “maybe” and shoots him. That’s it. That’s his big, badass one liner when he finally takes the bad guy down. “Maybe.”
It’s a lazy, disappointing cop-out of an ending to a lazy, disappointing cop-out of a film.
I hope I can do better ending this review.
…Meh. “Maybe.”
The bike appears to be a pretty cheap Yamaha. I checked, a Yamaha 250 has a top speed of about 75mph with a 0 - 60 time of about 3.7 seconds. The all-time speed record for a horse is 55mph.