SHADOWHEART- 2009

Director : Dean Alioto

Producer: Justin Ament

Release Date: 2009

Genre : Western/drama

Writer(s) : Dean Alioto, Peter Vanderwall, Brad Goodman

Story : Justin Ament

Rating : PG-13

Runtime: N/A

Genre: Drama, Western

Starring: Angus Macfadyen, Justin Ament, Daniel Baldwin, William Sadler

  With the great looking Movie poster and DVD cover I really expected a great film.....So lets get to it, I can only imagine the work that the entire cast and crew puts into a production like this. This is an Independant film but with a budget of 10 million I expected way more, However, it fell short wayyyyyyyy short. The first thing I pay attention to in watching a movie (most movies) is whether I care about the characters. And if the cast are making these characters actually come to life (beliveable) but I just couldn't bring myself to care about most of these people, not so much because of bad acting, alot of it was because the story itself just didnt pan out, not even with its own title. The feel of the whole movie was that it was very amateurish and the direction was off. The story didn't flow in a way that it should have, atlest not to feel real. Also, I don't like stories where there's not a good resolution, even if there's not a happy ending. This movie was bland and didn't leave me with the feeling of any sort of satisfaction. The theme seemed to be relentless evil without any real hope of the good guy (our hero) winning out in the end. Without giving away the end, I'll just say that, for this kind of story it failed to work for me. This is a bad movie storywise with NO redemption as promised in the title, just revenge. Marnie Alton who played mary cooper and Tonantzin Carmelo who played Miakoda were nice eye candy for the film, were some good points otherwise the movie is filled with lots of bad acting, bad direction, and really boring as hell for the first 20 minutes, the music intrudes into the scenes constantly, not helping the dialog which many lines are unintelligible. Continuity errors just ran rampant thruout hte film.  I will say the production values were pretty low with lighting, though there were some good shots. This film comes across as a religous movie in many ways, while the plot is entirely predictable, (the rail road destroying a virgin town is just to cliche'd in western stories) there is nothing at all original in the plot, the action sequences were just to slow and kinda boring. Sadly, this film was just plain disappointing to me.

6/10 Stars