Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: ALPHA GANG [Toronto International Film Festival - Toronto, Ontario]

Camp is an interesting idea and more spectacular when it is done with a usually more dramatic cast with the wind at its back. "Alpha Gang" [Special Presentations] from the Zellner Brothers who made "Sasquatch Sunset" takes a play from Quentin Dupieux’s game book looking for a sense of the abstract but getting something very much in between. It starts off like a "Cry Baby" in a would be retro apocalyptic landscape that looks awfully green. The people that populate the landscape move from civil war soldiers to Nazi servicemen to peasants with pitchforks from the dark ages. The gang is something else. Lea Seydoux leads the pack followed by a slimmed down Dave Bautista as Alpha 2. Because of his Guardians delivery, Bautista’s deadpan jokes work very well. The melding of later alphas in Lily Rose Depp and Riley Keough is inspired casting. Depp is not given much to do and tries her best to be weird but it is a less-than-expected follow up to "Nosferatu". She finds her rhythm though. And there are also a lot of great 50s songs as needle drops (albeit some are covers). There is though a certain offbeat feeling. This gang is aliens sent to this world (maybe not Earth) to either exterminate or colonize. Kelvin Harrison Jr. has the most to do but his character is by far the least interesting. Keough, because of her grandfather in Elvis and the leather jackets, is just an eerie play especially when an older song of Elvis’ plays later in the film as the closing arch...but it does work.

There are some great ideas and the film feels off kilter enough since that is what they are going for but it wants to be a little too wacky. Chris Pine then shows up as another alpha and his first few scenes while he is alone are brilliant in a way since you could also see him playing the 50s Dean icon but still with that Bill Shatner thought process. The way he delivers a would-be pick-up line and then unleashes violence in a local windmill is pitch perfect. It has some echoes to Ash but not fully. When he teams up with the other alphas you are looking for something more from him but the film is not really going that way. Moon Bae, whom I always remember talking to for "Cloud Atlas" before she truly got ahold of English is the heart of the movie in a weird way along with Bautista. She also has a great scene with Depp which goes awry. Again there are some great music moments and pushes that are beautiful but they are scattershot. When it finally gets to the meet up which is with a team of Betas (the next generation up -- they listen to punk) their leader (in Cate Blanchett_ is just bonkers. Blanchett in a way has done what she wanted to and is now playing with form. She could easily take the Helen Mirren route. That said it is tricky to know what her focus is here. The accents and almost pirate play is almost like Brando riffing and yet the Zellner brothers said at the screening that she is the one who helped get the film made. There is an awful lot of gun play and whether that is a satiric reference or a throwback to old exploitation movies, that part comes out a little flat but likely was the most expensive part of the movie. “Alpha Gang” is a lark in its own special way and is itself playing with form though its precise messiness comes off more as trying to be weird than actually being weird. 74%/C

By Tim Wassberg