Arne Toonen’s arch, blithely rude “Black Out” is another of the stylish, dark Euro-dramas that have become a specialty of Music Box Films and now its new genre label, Doppelganger Releasing. The most banal but truest reduction of Toonen’s brash style is to label him a dirtier, flashier Guy Ritchie who re-situates “The Hangover” in Holland. An ex-con wakes up in an Amsterdam hotel room, the day before his wedding, a gun and a dead man beside him; gangsters are convinced he’s responsible for the disappearance of twenty kilos of cocaine. Also disappeared: a chunk of his memory of how he got into this mess. Cue: squealing tires, punches to the face, nasty violence, ax-wielding women in spike heels, with a few pungent twists partaking fully of post-Tarantinoism. With Raymond Thiry, Kim Van Kooten, Renée Fokker, Bas Keijzer and actor-director-screenwriter Alex van Warmerdam. 91m. (Ray Pride)
“Black Out” opens Friday, February 21 at the Music Box and on VOD.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
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