X

Director: Jon Hewitt
Cast: Viva Bianca, Hanna Mangan-Lawrence, Stephen Phillips and Eamon Ferran
Releasing in cinemas: 24  November 2011
Rated: MA 15+

This crime thriller has something for everyone: gratuitous nudity, writhing sex scenes, drug abuse, dodgy cops, grungy gangsters, and loyal prostitutes. What more can you ask for? Please don't answer that. This latest film by Jon Hewitt, who directed Acolytes, rather dims what promise he showed previously.

High class hooker Holly (Viva Bianca) wants to kiss goodbye her precarious if profitable existence in Sydney and shove off to Paris. She has one last job to complete before she moves out. At the same time runaway teenager Shay (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) arrives broke in town, and has to join low life on the streets of King's Cross to survive. It’s tough on the newcomer trying to sell her body in a competitive and dangerous marketplace.

Peddling a bit of soft porn, the movie starts with the sensual Holly putting on a sex show for some kind of wealthy mother's club. After this splash of titillation we finally get on with the real story. Holly has planned her last threesome with a butt-ugly drug dealer. The other prostitute however is unavailable, having appeared stark naked in a shower before falling on her head and thus becoming indisposed. Desperate to keep the appointment, Holly picks up the novice Shay to help out - not a very bright move one might think.

After some shuffling around in the threesome, the girls go to tidy up in the bathroom, when their drug dealing client gets seriously demolished by maniac corrupt cop Bennett (Stephen Phillips). He's quickly on their trail as they witnessed the killing through a door. Bennett’s almost superhuman in his unrelenting pursuit of the girls. 

This leads to routine chases around the grotty parts of Sydney, without gaining much in the way of suspense. While hiding, Shay goes into ‘Little Miss Sunshine mode’, taking pity on a loser druggie in the next room of a sleazy hotel. Helping the woman take an injection in the hand suggests Shay knows all about fixes. There's more blatant nudity, and a fair dose of rough treatment to the runaway girls to keep the punters watching the screen. Assisting Shay to try and escape comes an unlikely romantic cab driver Harry (Eamon Farren), complete with rabbit and high hopes of being a magician.

The production never exceeds average TV standards, despite a few arty shots chucked into the mix. The cameraman seems to particularly enjoy car mirror reflections. Director Hewitt's uneven pacing coupled with clunky dialogue (he wrote the script with wife Belinda McClory) doesn't help the case. There’s even an oddball hypnotism scene with a wink to Lars von Trier.

The acting has a curiously flat feel about it, despite the hot scenes in the rumpy bumpy department, with obligatory  boobs and bums on full display. Sexploitation distracts from any sign of a decent plot, and lets the whole show fall in the mud.

Viva Bianca (Accidents Happen) carries off the beautiful call girl in a superficial performance. Hanna Mangan-Lawrence (Lucky Country), who’s capable of much better things, flounders at times possibly due to the script, but does at least bring compassion to her role. They both have steamy sex scenes. Belinda McClory does a sort of Hitchcock appearing as Katherine/Marilyn. Eamon Farren (Red Dog) neatly captures the sympathetic taxi driver, although Stephen Phillips (Winners & Losers TV) only needs to foam at the mouth to complete his crazed reading. This is te sort of acting we see in many TV features, which due to budget constrictions and time pressure, are often lacking in depth of characterization.

There have been a number of exceptional Australian crime films, a genre which generally works, as Animal Kingdom and Noise prove. So while Jon Hewitt’s X isn’t a total disaster, with a few censorship cuts it would pass muster any night on late-night TV. However we might expect more entertainment when paying at the cinema. X will have most appeal to puerile audiences, for whom the titillation of soft porn and full frontal nudity may outweigh the paucity of innovation.  

John Bale