GOING IN: 3 STARS. “feels born out of a genuine love of the films that inspired it.”
“Going In,” a gritty new crime drama now available on Amazon Prime Video, Apple/iTunes and cable video on demand, is a stylistic homage to the buddy movies of the 1980s that rides the line between parody and tribute.
Set in Toronto, in a time before sky scrapers dominated the downtown, writer and director Evan Rissi plays philosophy professor Leslie Boothe, a dullish, straight-edge type, more interested in Jean Paul Sartre than booze, drugs or partying.
“You come to realize that coming into being is the same as turning into nothing,” he lectures to his students, “that being and nothing unite as becoming.”
“Yeah,” says a smart aleck student, “becoming… bored.”
His wild child past, however, is revealed when Reuben Goldstein (Ira Goldman), a face from the past, appears. Once best friends, the two haven’t seen one another in five years, ever since Boothe got sober and started going to bed before 10 pm.
“I need to talk to you,” says Goldstein. “Meet me tonight at the bar. You know the one.”
Boothe made a promise years ago to help Goldstein whenever he needed it, and how Goldstein has come to collect. Seems his kid brother Saul has been working for a drug lord named Feng (Victor D.S. Man) selling a nasty new drug called Pearl.
News reports say the highly addictive drug has turned the city upside down, and is “even more dangerous than originally anticipated.” It gives uses a fifteen-minute out-of-body experience or “O.B.E for short” that turns them into a zombie-like state with white, glassy eyes.
Saul has disappeared and Goldstein needs help to find him. The police can’t do anything, Feng is too powerful, and the security around him is airtight. The only way they can get access is through an underground tournament the criminal hosts every six months. “It’s a mysterious competition,” says Goldstein. “No one knows what the challenge is till they begin. You have to prepare for anything. If you come with me, we have a better chance.”
A man of his word, Boothe reluctantly agrees to help, and dives into the seedy underbelly of 1980s Toronto.
“Going In” is a low-budget, yet loving throwback to 1980s film stereotypes. The soundtrack drips with a synth score, there are underground nightclubs, mismatched buddies à la “Lethal Weapon” and “Silver Streak,” a work-out montage, a subway shootout, clothes borrowed from Sonny” Crockett’s closet, a villain who cackles “You came here for your brother? No! You came here to die!” and even motorcycle ninjas.
Rissi pays tribute, but it’s not really tongue-in-cheek. The references are there, should you be keeping track, but they’re accompanied by a pretty good story, one with stakes and forward momentum.
The situation is extreme—particularly when we get to the high-stakes competition—but that’s part of the appeal. The party trick Rissi manages here is ride the line between satire and straight-faced storytelling. It works, even if the action scenes are scarce and hindered by the film’s shoestring $80,000 budget. Nonetheless, “Going In” has a DIY charm, that feels born out of a genuine love of the films that inspired it.
