Without any irony I can safely say that Double Down by Neil Breen is a ground breaking masterpiece, and I don't dish out that word for many films. Apparently it's been making the rounds online amongst the "so-bad-it's-good" movie fans, and that's perfectly understandable because at first glance I fell into that mindset, and there are certainly more than a few hilarious moments owing to the flatness of Neil Breen's central performance and lines like "I can't wait to be your wife." But that's just it, this isn't a film trying to be a great film if you get my meaning, like all great films it doesn't have room for indulgence or fancy. It has themes and ideas and it ties them together tightly, and in this way it reminds me of the work of Terrence Malick, which explores very similar themes and is similar in style and execution. Antonioni's The Passenger also comes to mind.
The film is about a kind of freelance super hacker agent played by Breen himself. In the film's masterful opening he awakens in the desert and introduces himself completely as a sort of omnipotent, reclusive shadow figure, free of all attachments, who has major world governments at the very tips of his fingers, and who cannot be touched due to his amazing foresight which allows him to take great precautions to preserve himself, like planting biological weapons under major cities in order to gain leverage over any potential threats to him. He is the superhuman conduit who commands and cancels oppressive pseudo-control agencies from the inside by his very being, and yet with this power comes a great burden. He is completely alone, although never lonely, beset by the demons of his past, struggling with longing, regret and self-doubt despite his cool exterior and effortless ability. While everyone plots and schemes around him one can't help but feel that he is in control of it, and yet completely out of control, as befits the double-edged sword of power.
The film's brilliant narrative has a dreamlike fragmentation to it, mirroring the shattered identity of the lead character, who continually finds himself waking in the arid desert over and over, each time forced to relive old memories while being called back into civilization by shadowy agents with various menial tasks for him, from assassinations to shutting down Las Vegas to prevent a terrorist attack (menial because as he states he could rig presidential elections or cut off a nation's water supply). Rather than give him authority, it seems this omnipotent power has merely imprisoned him in internal questioning because at that level right and wrong have gone out the window, and there is only possibility and cause and effect, which yet is cancelled out by a higher power, a destructive truth. Rather than benefit him personally, it has instead made him the most easily used. When asked to assassinate a couple in Las Vegas he accidentally drugs the wrong couple with a narcotic strawberry (one of the most surreal images is of him sticking a syringe into a strawberry). Throughout the film there is stock footage of different war zones and military operations as he describes the nature of covert warfare. He is the ultimate soldier, because he is the cause of all the wars in the world and war caused him.
In the first act of the film it goes into his past, into the life he once had with the love of his life he met at age 7, who is assassinated after he proposes to her in a pool. This is his carefree innocence, his emotional life, and when she is shot, this becomes a necessary part of him, a void within him that fuels him and makes him ruthless. In piece of brilliant symbolism he lies with his arms outstretched over her as she bleeds, floating in the pool. She becomes a symbol of death to him, as with her his feminine, emotional side died and he became the lone man we see in the film. In the end he drives away again into the barren, lonely desert from whence he came, just another lone wanderer.
I give this film my highest praise. I don't know where this uncanny Vulcan film director came from but his work has been causing a sensation online, with comparisons to The Room among the so-bad-it's-good crowd, and yet while you could look at it that way from a technical standpoint if you wanted, I feel this film is so much more than that without reaching.
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