Country: USA
Movie Review: “The Girl Is in Trouble” is a discouraging crime thriller that is by turns tedious, farcical, and dull. The story starts with August (Columbus Short), a Nigerian iPod DJ (better joke of the film), being fired from Manhattan's Lower East Side club ‘The Void’. It was in this same club that he met Signe (Alicja Bachleda), a Swedish singer-guitarist who is now begging for his help in a complicated case involving a murder. The victim of the murder in question is August’s best friend, Jesus Guzman, a Dominican drug dealer whose tough brother, Angel (Wilmer Valderrama), swears revenge. The crime, enveloped by blurry mystery, took place in the luxurious apartment of the womanizer Nicholas (Jesse Spencer), a pompous rich guy who, at that time, was accompanied by Signe, enjoying an unrestrained night of excesses. Certainly, one of them is the killer, but with the word of one against the other, who is telling the truth? First-time Nigerian-American director and co-writer, Julius Onah, attempts to a stylish approach, but the result was exactly the opposite. The junky messages occasionally popping up on the screen are superfluous, and the camera moves undecidedly and ungraciously. It felt like the homework hadn’t been done, and moreover, all this was aggravated by the use of incongruous tones, lame storytelling, unconvincing performances, and very basic dialogues. Music is visibly of great importance to Onah, and still the score didn’t work at all, so intrusive it was. The obnoxious characters were so uninteresting that I could only sneer. Everything went too bad in this inexpressive tale of international contours set in Downtown NYC.
