For nearly 20 years, director William Kaufman has been marrying direct-to-video meat and potatoes with tactical gunplay authenticity and a hardboiled mean streak. His debut, The Prodigy, answered the question of what would happen if the killer in a Saw/The Collector-style horror flick was a John Wick-type one-man army tearing through gangsters, and his other earlier films similarly waded through crime grime and grisliness. The Jarhead and Marine sequels, zombies and soldiers of his more recent films have gotten away from such grittiness but The Channel is Kaufman returning to his crime thriller roots with a vengeance.
A return to a New Orleans setting for the first time since his vicious 2010 cops-vs-mercs thriller Sinners and Saints should already prime fans for these 95 minutes of one-bad-night survival. Actually, it’s closer to 75 minutes of survival because Kaufman drops the audience directly into a heavily-armed bank robbery and spends the next near half-hour showing why he’s the DTV king of tactical action. The methodical veterans-turned-criminal heist and subsequent SWAT ambush might remind some of the armored truck opening from Den of Thieves; Kaufman’s action proudly embraces the influence of that film and its ilk, going back to Heat via this opening shootout’s pounding gunfire and getaway tactics.
Robber and police corpses in its wake, that disastrous getaway is only the start to a heist-gone-wrong actioner film that actually ends up resembling a NOLA-set reimagining of 21 Bridges. Clayne Crawford and Max Martini as outlaw brothers Jamie and Mic Sheridan find themselves with about a million in loot, a relentless lawman rapidly closing the dragnet and the cutthroat Irish Channel underworld between them and escape from the city. Special Agent Frank Ross (Nicoye Banks) brings a no-bullshit doggedness to The Channel’s cat-and-mouse momentum, neatly contrasting with the brothers’ rattled midnight odyssey from one tense meet and burst of violence to the next as consequences mount. Kaufman finesses a superb balance of family friction and criminal tension that never takes its foot off the gas, but it’s Crawford and Martini alongside Juliene Joyner as Jamie’s girlfriend Ava who ensure those dynamics feel raw and natural between the acid baths, shotgun blasts and street standoffs filling the runtime. Whether fighting kaiju, cartel or Moldovan ghost soldiers, Martini has always elevated whatever genre fare he’s in via his steely presence, and this meaty lead role as the hair-trigger older brother injects some dramatic bite to the propulsive thrills.
Plot contrivances, familiar crime film clichés, and the occasional stilted side performance pepper the brothers’ escape across the city and from a local kingpin’s wrath, but neither diminishes the intensity or shot-on-location atmosphere that Kaufman wrings from this thrill ride. Culminating in a chaotic foot chase/gunfight finale (once again displaying the director’s sharp eye for staging), The Channel is Kaufman’s most handsome, most well-crafted and most dramatically investing thriller yet. His other works may boast bigger, bloodier, meaner action but this acts as a taut wiry refinement of the best qualities that have defined his filmography. The personal stakes and mean-spirited edge of The Prodigy, the New Orleans sense of place and merciless gunplay of Sinners and Saints, the effective tough guy casting in Hit List and Daylight’s End: it all coalesces in The Channel.
Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media
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