The American Side (2016; Jenna Ricker)

GRADE: C

By Daniel Barnes

I can’t describe how much I want to like a scruffy, amiable, widescreen neo-noir lovingly shot in and around Buffalo.  Unfortunately, The American Side feels stiff from start to finish.

Co-writer Greg Stuhr makes for an extremely unconvincing hard-boiled lead as Polish private dick Charlie Paczynski.  Charlie is “still a loser” and still shaking down cheating husbands in a back-alley bar.  When his stripper partner goes missing on a routine blackmail mission, Charlie gets drawn into a rote plot involving a monotone femme fatale (Camilla Belle), her contemptuous intellectual brother (Matthew Broderick), a Niagara Falls enthusiast (Robert Forster, bringing it), a few dead bodies and a stolen Nikola Tesla notebook.

The film’s sorry attempts to recycle film noir tropes amuse for the first ten or twenty minutes.  By the time The American Side re-creates the North by Northwest crop duster scene for literally no reason whatsoever, it becomes merely annoying.  Director and co-writer Ricker makes inspired use of Buffalo locations, and there some beautiful moments (as well as an in-stride Super Bowl XXV joke).  However, there is also a lot of clunky corner-cutting.

If Ricker ditched the glossy, widescreen treatment for something grittier and more faithful to the essence of film noir, this might have been something more than a forgettable novelty.

Read more of Daniel’s reviews at Dare Daniel and Rotten Tomatoes, and listen to Daniel on the Dare Daniel podcast.