Red Lined

Rating

Director

Glenn Ruehland

Screenplay

Glenn Ruehland

Length

1h 29m

Starring

Damian Bradford, Allison Cratchley, Terry Serio, Warwick Young, Vanessa Steele, Steve Bisley, Damian de Montemas, Steve Vella, Jason Chong, Gordon Waddell

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
Fast cars, beautiful men and women, and the drug trade are the cornerstones of an underworld empire in the Australian film Red Lined.

Featuring an array of Australian newcomers, Red Lined stars Damian Bradford as Dymo, the head of a crime syndicate whose drug dealing domain is the target of a police investigation and an attempt to rid the city of his unwanted presence. The problem is that Dymo and his associates are smart, well funded and know their way around guns and explosives.

When two detectives, Peter Dasha (Warwick Young) and Blondine Dimaggio (Vanessa Steele) finger rival drug dealer Jack Hand (Terry Serio) for an attempt on Dymo’s life as well as other illegal activities, Jack rolls and agrees to help set up Dymo with a fake drug deal. The setup is nearly perfect, but Dymo and Jack both have other plans, and the cops are stuck in the middle.

Much of the first half of Red Lined is used to set up a multitude of characters. From Dymo and his girlfriend Carli (Allison Cratchley) to partners Dimaggio and Dasha to Jack and Dymo’s faithful associate Zed (Damian De Montemas), Red Lined makes use of both talented and untalented actors. With a stock of two-dimensional characters, Bradford and Steele make the best of their respective roles. Their performances are the most developed of all, while Serio and Young spend their time chewing through the pages of the screenplay as if they were teething children. Meanwhile, actors like Cratchley and De Montemas stand their ground and neither detract from nor embellish the project.

The screenplay, while fraught with pitiful character development, does develop itself enough that you can root for felon protagonists to triumph over the legal and villainous antagonists. The story is sound in many areas, but others, such as the drawn-out opening, the lengthy chase sequences and the uninteresting drug deals, feel like window-dressing for macho audiences. Having written and directed his own screenplay, Glenn Ruehland is at fault for the film’s failures and he also deserves thanks for the film’s successful elements.

The film fails on many character development levels, and also suffers from a slow, at times interminable, pace. The movie feels longer than its brief hour-and-a-half and despite a plethora of intriguing plot devices and chase ideas, their execution is weak and underwhelming. The screenplay does have a discernable path and it’s not hard to empathize with the film’s protagonist characters. A freight-yard, low-speed chase sequence bears the markings of a well designed idea, but the intelligent forethought is lost in the implementation.

Adrenaline junkies will find many reasons to love Red Lined, but many of its leisurely action scenes may leave them wanting more. Additionally, hot rod enthusiasts will love the film simply for its attention to detail regarding sports cars. The problem is that the rest of the movie-going public is unlikely to be attracted to such an unknown film, despite its simplistic appeal.

Review Written

May 6, 2003