‘FROGS for Snakes” starts out as yet another sub-Tarantino neo-noir film before turning into a feature-length joke about actors who literally kill for parts.
It’s a clever, amusing joke, but one that would probably work better on the stage. Movies tend to favor relatively fast-paced, naturalistic storytelling. And in the end, the slowness, talkiness and studied jokiness of “Frogs for Snakes” (the title is from a 1957 blues song) make it hard to care about the plot or the characters.
For one thing, it’s never entirely clear if the people we see shaking down debtors one minute and practicing their monologues for acting class the next, are theater folk obsessed with gangsterism or gangsters desperate to be actors.
Eva (Barbara Hershey) is the best enforcer for ex-husband Al (Robbie Coltrane), a loan shark/off-Broadway impresario. (“I don’t kill, I maim,” she tells a debtor who says that if she kills him, she won’t get the money. She’s also by far the best actor in her class.
She wants to get out of the business and move out to Long Island with her son. But the murder of her lover, Zip (John Leguizamo), by Al’s driver – who wants Zip’s role in a production of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” – changes everything.
Now Eva wants revenge as well as out, and she joins forces with her statuesque bad actress friend Myrna (Lisa Marie). But their plan coincides with the arrival in town of two tough jocks/actors/enforcers and the murderous breakdown of rival outerborough actress Simone (Debi Mazar).
It all takes place in the East Village. Everyone drives cars with fins and talks in creaky Noo Yawk accents – not surprising, given that half of the cast are actually Brits (Coltrane occasionally sounds sort of Russian). In between long monologues, some of which are played for chuckles, there is a lot of gratuitous, grisly violence, including a decapitation by shotgun blast.
The best thing about the film is Hershey. She looks terrific – and while movies featuring hot fortysomething actresses who sleep with younger men seem to be a Hollywood trend (see “The Love Letter”), it’s no stretch to believe that Leguizamo would fall for her.
Director Amos Poe elicits smart, controlled and sometimes funny performances from the rest of a cast which includes Clarence Williams III (Linc from the original “Mod Squad”) and Harry Hamlin. But in the end, Poe sinks the movie under his own hipsterism. You get the uncomfortable impression that it’s all an indulgent in-joke for him and his friends.
