Friendship can be a tricky thing.
You can spend years hanging out with someone only to see all that time invested undone in a matter of seconds. Sometimes you just grow apart. Sometimes you have a stupid argument. And sometimes there’s another person involved.
Jonah (Munro Chambers), Sasha (Emily Tyra) and Richie (Christopher Gray) have been a trio for as long they can remember. Jonah’s the quiet one. Richie’s volatile personality means he spends as much time apologizing as he does reveling in his white privilege. And Sasha, in addition to being Richie’s squeeze, vacillates between mother, referee, wife material and whore.
Harpoon
4.5 out of 5 stars.
Rated: R
Run Time: 83 minutes
Directed by Rob Grant
Starring Munro Chambers, Emily Tyra and Christopher Gray
Now available on Blu-Ray and most streaming Video-on-Demand platforms
None of them are particularly good people, but then again, who among us really is. We all have secrets. We all lie. We all tempt fate.
"Harpoon" is more than just one of the best films released so far this year, it’s a whip-smart, pitch-black satire that strands three people of questionable moral compass in an untenable situation and lets them stew.
On the morning of a planned birthday boating excursion, Richie’s temper boils over and he brutally beats Jonah, whom he suspects of trying to sleep with Sasha. Only what he believed were secretive, salacious texts turn out to be sneaky back-and-forth missives about Richie’s birthday gift, a shiny new harpoon, or spear-gun, as Jonah consistently corrects Sasha.
Once at sea, with tensions still roiled, Jonah and Sasha browbeat Richie into an apology, and force reparations — a tit-for-tat, punch-for-punch — that both shows the depth of the trio’s bonds and the fucked-up chemistry that fuels their fracturing dynamic.
Still, Richie just can’t let go of his suspicion, and before long, accusations spiral into violence and secrets are revealed. It turns out that Richie’s father is a made man, powerful enough to make people who disrespect his family disappear. And Sasha fears that she might have aligned herself with a possible sociopath because his last girlfriend, who got pregnant during a tryst, was found brutally murdered.
And that’s all before Richie’s yacht suddenly loses power, stranding them miles from shore out in the open water.
The amazing thing about "Harpoon" is how effectively it toys with both the group dynamic and viewer loyalties. No one character is exactly as they appear. And slowly, as hours turn to days, survival creates a new kind of friendship — that of necessity — that further strains the trio’s fragile alliance.
Kudos to writer-director Rob Grant and his very capable cast. "Harpoon" never drags because the three actors so fully embrace their characters and Grant consistently comes up with increasingly sadistic scenarios to test their fortitude, including a wonderfully detailed sequence where Sasha tells the story of a doomed rescue effort at sea where a small band of survivors were forced to drink the blood of the weakest on-board to stay hydrated until help arrived.
Much of "Harpoon" plays like Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," if that movie had been about the intersection of awful people who had angered the gods and whose every move was unknowingly a misstep and a mistake. Seriously, there's even a narrator for no reason other than a droll voiceover spitting insults at the three and ticking off their blunders is savagely funny.
It’s impossible to say more about the tantalizing surprises packed into the film’s bloody third act without spoiling the joy of witnessing their unraveling first-hand with no idea where this story might go next.
We’ve all had friends we said we’d die to defend, and more than likely, at that moment, we fully meant it.
But would you feel the same way if you knew everything about that person, especially the deepest, darkest secrets they tried to hide?
"Harpoon" is more than just a gory-good revenge thriller and a chilling dissection of human connections.
It trolls waters so dark and murky that you almost feel guilty for laughing at the karmic comeuppance that befalls Jonah, Sasha and Richie.
Almost.
After all, sometimes people do get what they truly deserve.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace.
Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter (@BVB_reviews).
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This article appears in Oct 10-17, 2019.