There’s nothing really fast about Fast Charlie, a relaxed, medium-weight saunter through thriller territory in the company of some fine people.
Pierce Brosnan, now in his 70s but still with the 007 swagger and nonchalance, plays Charlie, a fixer for an aged gang boss who winds up on the wrong side of a rival gang boss in a turf war in New Orleans.
The film is an adaptation of Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler, a writer who puts a comedic spin on familiar crime-fiction material. And more information than what I’ve already written isn’t strictly necessary. You’ve seen this movie before.
But the casting is good and includes James Caan in his very last performance – and it looks it – as Charlie’s boss, Stan, who is at the wrong end of a takeover attempt by Gbenga Akinnagbe’s young-man-in-a-hurry Beggar.
Morena Baccarin plays the pretty taxidermist who innocently gets caught in the crossfire as the gang-on-gang mayhem escalates, and provides the potential love interest in a neat bit of “surely she’s too young for old Charlie” peekaboo plotting that keeps us guessing. Sort of.
Brosnan has for some reason decided on a big Southern accent which drifts a bit here and there. Is it a 007 thing? Daniel Craig was doing something similar in Knives Out and Logan Lucky, but Craig chewed his way through his vowels a lot more elaborately than Brosnan, who might be suggesting that he’s New Orleans by way of Ireland. It’s never explicitly discussed.
Shooting on Fast Charlie started in April and by July Caan was dead. From what we see on screen he’s clearly not long for this world – his make-up looks like the sort that’s applied in a morgue. There is a touch of the grims about all this but it’s also touching at times too. There’s a tender scene where old Stan celebrates his birthday and has to blow the candles out on his cake, which Caan, with COPD, cannot really do. But beneath the age and infirmity he still has it, and turns it on periodically to remind us what a charismatic performer he was.
Brosnan, too, still has it, and puts in a relaxed performance that’s all charm and quiet irony. Sharon Gless gets the laughs, though, as a foul-mouthed old trollop whose every utterance contains either a profanity or a sexual reference, all of them aimed at Baccarin’s Marcie.
Philip Noyce directs, and while he hasn’t done much in the way of grabbing headlines since his last glory run of Bone Collector, Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American over 20 years ago, he has worked relentlessly ever since and is a slick director who knows how to make things look good and keep the pace up. In lesser hands this would look like the slightly threadbare item it is.
Of course it’s all a bit Tarantino, but that’s fine. This is the sort of movie where a young idiot with a fast mouth is always only seconds away from blowing his head off accidentally. Whoops, so he did have brains after all.
The best way to consume it is in exactly the way it’s been made, as an exercise in retro style. It has the banging-door soundtrack, an emphasis on cars and driving, and overhead shots delivered with a flourish as if drones had not yet been invented.
I watched it on a Thursday night, and a Thursday night movie is where I’d peg it, maybe even Wednesday – entertaining, undemanding, the sort of thing you don’t really need to pause if you have to visit the bathroom. Watching movies can’t all be Tarkovsky and crusading documentaries.
Fast Charlie – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
