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Marcus D. Russell’s “Sex, Love & Z-Parts” is
really the sort of film with a good idea, and pretty disastrous results.
Russell’s quasi-comedy gangster short is a pretty irritating series of
events based around this car lover who plans to fix a minor league
baseball game and continues digging his grave with people he owes money
to. One of the caveats of Russell’s film is the often frantic and
brutally grueling direction based around almost endless quick cuts, and
frantic editing that’s comprised of scenarios from our main character,
sporadic narration, and a grainy film quality that makes the film
sometimes difficult to watch.
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Beyond that, Russell becomes too bogged down
in the quasi-style and hip posturing to keep the balance of
comedy and crime thriller, thus this inevitably feels
utterly scattered and messy. The story can never stick on one
path long enough to keep the audiences attention, so it
shifts almost incessantly between different moods and
textures from neo-noir, to heist pic, to hyper kinetic
gangster pic, to comedy, and so on, so “Sex, Love and
Z-Parts” ends up becoming brutally sloppy, utterly
unresolved, and incoherent. |
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And how many times can we hear the same hip
hop dissection? How many times can we sit through the Jamaican
stereotypes intended for comedic relief? Not too many, as Russell’s
film proves.
In spite of the premise, Russell's crime heist comedy is never focused
enough to be entertaining. It steps in and out of different genres and
themes and is a rather messy, incoherent short film.
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