Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Director: Bobby Moresco, Defiant Screen Entertainment.
Cast: Karl Urban, Sofia Vergara, Grace Byers, Andy Garcia.
Billed as a classic noir cop thriller, Bent is based on J.P. O’Donnell’s popular ‘Gallagher’ novels.
On his latest private investigation, a shamed former cop connects a murder case to a government conspiracy involving rogue agents from a top spy agency.
The storyline goes something like this. After three years in prison, disgraced former detective Danny Gallagher (Urban, Star Trek) makes a plan to seek revenge for a drug bust that went horribly wrong, claiming the life of his partner (Vincent Spano) and painting him as a ‘bent’ (corrupt) cop.
His search for the truth leads him to an old friend, Jimmy Murtha (Garcia, The Godfather Part III, For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story), a retired cop who has fought corruption throughout his career.
Gallagher also interacts with a seductive federal agent, Rebecca (Vergara, Modern Family) in an unpersuasive fling. He also hunts down a dreary bunch of hints and links involving a sequence of suspicious characters. Then there’s the case of a car bombing that could be connected to an elaborate, high stakes conspiracy.
Of Bent, novelist O’Donnell says: “Gallagher, the protagonist, is the man that all the boys dream of becoming and all the women dream of having by their side”.
O’Donnell goes on to say: “Director Bobby Moresco [Crash] did a masterful job in adapting my novel to a feature length motion picture in the classic tradition of film noir. Seeing the characters I created come to life on the screen was indeed an unimaginable thrill for me. Bobby also consolidated several minor characters from my novel and created one compelling new character, Murtha (Andy Garcia), who plays a vital role in the plot of Bent”.
This film is not to be confused with the 1997 Holocaust-era drama of the same name by director Sean Mathias from a screenplay by Martin Sherman. It details the ill fortunes, secret love and eventual salvation of two gay men in the Nazi-run Dachau death camp.
To win one of three DVDs of Bent from director Moresco, just tell us who created the character of Gallagher. Entries should be sent to [email protected] by next Monday, 13 August 2018. Names of the winners will be announced in Frank Cassidy’s PS-sssst…! column next week.
