Remarkable Power (Region 1 Edition)   Starring: Tom Arnold, Kevin Nealon, Evan Peters and Nora Zehetner MTI Home Video RRP: $24.95 039414521405 Certificate: R Available 16 February 2010

Jack West can see the end of his fifteen year career as a top talk show host; this only leads to more bitterness as he discovers that his wife is having an affair with a pro Baseball player. Meanwhile, across town, slacker Ross dreams of getting rich quick through a, inspirational set of tapes. He finally thinks that his chance has come when he bumps into, Preston, the guy off the infomercial. The truth is their lives are linked and about to spiral out of control...

Remarkable Power (2008 - 1 hr, 30 min, 50 sec) is a dark comedy directed and co written by Brandon Beckner.

Multi-thread stories have grown in popularity with a number of films pulling this difficult feat off with aplomb. Unfortunately Remarkable Power isn’t one of those films. Essentially there are three intersecting stories here. The first is the attempt by West to fake his own death so that he can get back ratings and get back at the guy who is sleeping with his wife. The second has Ross meeting Preston and accidentally killing him, only for the body to disappear when he finally goes to the cops and lastly we have Preston who is up to his eyes in debt so takes on a job to find a dead white male body, which can be collected from his house. With this information most will have already worked out the whole plot.

The plot isn’t the problem here, most of these films tend to start at the end and unravel the mystery by jumping time and character, the problem here is that the film jumps a little too much, leaving little room to develop the characters enough so that the audience cares what happens to them. This is not helped by some understated acting from the cast.

Don’t get me wrong the film isn’t awful, and for an independent it has some high production values, there is even someone in the film that most audience would recognise, in the form of Tom Arnold who plays a private investigator, the guide for the audience through the narrative.

Kevin Nealon plays Jack West, but for some reason he makes his character almost completely unlikable, more of a comedy spin on this character would have gone a long way to making this a better movie. The same can be said of newcomer Evan Peters character portrayal of Ross. The film being a comedy of errors could have done better with a different spin on these two. The only person who seems to have had an idea that there should have been an element of absurdity was Kip Pardue (Preston).

So it’s not all bad, but then it’s not as good as it should have been. The disc which was provided was a screener so it is difficult to say what the final audio and video will be like. The only extra on the disc was the original theatrical trailer.

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Charles Packer