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DIRECTED BY: Ivan Doan

FEATURING: Ivan Doan, Maria Glazunova, Konstantin Gerasimyuk, Eric R. Gilliatt, Bill Konstantinidis, Philippa Peter

PLOT: Christopher Gabriel emerges from a dream to find himself a pawn in an international game of geopolitical warfare, and attempts to uncover the meaning of his role and explore his newly discovered abilities.

COMMENTS: “What do you mean?” It’s easily the most common line of dialogue in Overturn: Awakening of the Warrior. A character unleashes a complex metaphysical monologue with a raised eyebrow and a self-satisfied smile, smug in their superior  knowledge. Their conversational partner invariably responds with narrowed eyes and the tone of someone with a well-used BS detector, “What do you mean?”

It’s a crucial question for the film itself, which tries to fake importance by spouting a lot of dialogue that doesn’t “mean” anything at all. The barest scraps of a plot revolve around a young man’s discovery of a titanic battle between good and evil, but neither the scale of the conflict nor the stakes of the outcome are ever articulated. His interactions aren’t with characters so much as with signifiers with names like The Servant, The Judge, or The Informer: all portent, no content. Every other scene is one of those dialogues where characters say big words with great conviction, broken up with occasional martial arts demonstrations and—most oddly—vlog posts where Christopher alludes to all the crazy stuff going on. (Said crazy stuff is never detailed with any specificity.) What passes for tension is mostly bluster, and what passes for conflict is merely pronouncement.

At this point, I should note that, while researching this film, I discovered that it’s a continuation of a webseries called “Overturn” featuring several of the same actors and characters. Is it a direct sequel, or a re-imagining of the same premise, à la Adolescence of Utena? That’s not really clear, and while I could try speedrunning the series, I don’t think there’s much value in doing so, because the film is so lacking in anything concrete that it honestly doesn’t matter what the connection is. There’s nothing in the feature that would suddenly become more explicit with the background provided by a 3-minute episode. It’s just bigger.

The thing is, Overturn: Awakening… is actually a pretty good-looking film. Cinematographer Sergey Kachanov stages attractive vistas in and around the lively parks and gardens of Kyiv circa 2013. (Given current events, seeing the city in this way is bittersweet.) And the cast looks the part, from the pretty Glazunova to the ominously grizzled Gerasimyuk. Given that exactly one actor in the film can call English their first language, they deliver their word-salad speeches with reasonable skill overall. In particular, I strongly suspect Gerasimyuk is delivering all his English dialogue phonetically, but with no discernible decrease in menace. Doan, a strikingly handsome lead who sports the film’s best American accent and demonstrates decent martial arts skills, anchors the film. (It’s often obvious when punches are being pulled, and the faceless ninjas he fights do that thing where they gang up on Doan but then attack him one-by-one. Let’s give the fight scenes a B-.) Parts of Overturn et al pass themselves off quite effectively as a new addition to the spy canon.

Unfortunately, Doan the actor is significantly hamstrung by Doan the screenwriter, Doan the director, and Doan the editor. Aside from the frustrating lack of anything actually happening, Overturn: AOTW has absolutely no pacing whatsoever. Scenes slam into each other with no regard for logical development, intriguing ideas are quickly dropped and forgotten, and rhythms repeat without variation to the point of tedium. There are almost no scenes with more than two people, and an excessive number of them take place on park benches and riverwalks. What’s ultimately weirdest about the movie is that its perception of itself is so wildly different from what it actually presents. It thinks it’s a deep exploration of the psychology of self. It’s mainly people talking in circles.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…certainly takes the worlds of martial arts action and philosophical pondering to a different place… a straight-forward, thinking man’s amalgamation of philosophy, action, and science fiction rolled into an independent film effort that feels like a story only getting started.” – Kirk Fernwood, OneFilmFan

(This movie was nominated for review by Dick, who described it as “Bruce Lee meets Andrey Tarkovsky.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)