“Brush with Danger” is film that I first heard of, when I was doing a news story on it for this site. The film had interesting stills that made me want to check this film out.
The film follows a Ken (Ken Zheng) and Alice (Livi Zheng) who move to America after having to flee China. They struggled on the streets of Seattle until they meet an art dealer. He takes an interest in Alice’s paintings and invites her and Ken to his home. But the two realizes he’s all what he seems, as he wants to exploit Alice’s talents to forge a long lost Van Gogh painting. Now Ken and Alice is caught in his art forgery scheme, as they try to escape from him, the criminals that brought the painting and the police.
Going into “Brush with Danger”, I was hoping that this would at least be a good film. With an interesting plot and the stills for this film it made me curious about it. I hate saying the fact that this film was disappointing, as this felt like a boring film from start to finish.
Most of that had to do with the film’s direction. Livi Zheng’s direction felt very lifeless, as there was no energy in any of the film’s scenes. Whether it’s the action scenes to some of the way that she has her cast interact with one another, everything in this film felt very dull. When you’re watching a film that’s supposed to be an action thriller and you feel like nothing is happening, you’re bored out of your mind. That’s what I felt for most of this film. The other thing that I didn’t like about the direction was the fact that the acting was either over the top or unenergetic. Zheng doesn’t do a good job with the way she directs her cast. There’s no attempt by her to get her cast to bring some life to these characters. It made some of the scenes very dull and I’m given no reason to be interested in this film.
Ken and Livi Zheng’s screenplay was worse than her directing. What makes this screenplay bad was the fact that there is hardly any character development that goes on here. This really hurt the film’s characters as they were all one dimensional throughout the whole film. The screenplay doesn’t go into the relationship that the brother and sister have towards one another. It would’ve made the whole dynamic between the two interesting and maybe I would've been invested more. Instead, I was stuck with a story that had flat characters. The other thing that their screenplay was lacking was action. There really wasn’t many action scenes, as I never felt the threat of danger for the brother and sister for most of the film. It made it very hard for me to sit through this film, as it felt like almost nothing was happening and the action had no suspense to it. When you feel that way in an action film, you tend to be bored very quickly and looking to do other things.
This was one of those films which it was very hard to sit through from start to finish. “Brush with Danger” is one of those films which fails completely in character development and direction.
“Brush with Danger” Opens in New York today, Los Angeles on September 26th and San Francisco on October 3rd. For more information on this film, you can visit the film’s official website at: www.brushwithdanger.com.
Review Rating: One Star.
