Film Review: Triple Hit (2009)

SYNOPSIS:

Disgraced scientist Rebecca Hunter gets more than she’d bargained for when her illegal research into parallel universes lands her in a terrifying, dystopian alternate reality, unaware that similar experiments are also being attempted by two of her parallel selves: Anastasia, the Science Director for a gulag in the People’s Republic of Great Britain, and Sarah, a professor in a utopian, high-tech society. As the universe begins to unravel around her Rebecca come face to face with unfamiliar versions of friends, colleagues, and even herself, and quickly realizes that in these strange new worlds everyone has their own agendas. But who can she trust and can she figure out how to set things right before the entire multiverse destroyed?

REVIEW:

Written and directed by Huw Bowen
Starring: Abigail Tarttelin, Damian Hayes, Alan Convy, Roger Harding

I was working at Borders one day, when a not unattractive young girl came in wearing a t-shirt that caught my attention. The front of it said “Schrodinger’s cat is dead”. The back of it said,”Schrodinger’s cat is not dead.” At the time, I was unaware of who this Schrodinger was and, feeling lucky that I was working at a bookstore, got to researching. Turns out, for any of you who may not know, Schrodinger had a theory regarding quantum physics and the true state of reality. In a nutshell, if there was a cat in a box that had been exposed to enough radiation to possibly kill it while in that box, the cat would remain in both states, living and dead, until someone opened the box and actualized the true state of the cat. Before the cat was discovered to be alive or dead, it was actually both. Cool stuff.

A friend once used this theory to try to get out of buying more beer. When accused of drinking the last beer, he told his roommate that until his roommate had opened the fridge and actualized the fact that no beer was in it, there was a possibility that there was, and thus it was the roommate’s fault there wasn’t, for opening the fridge in the first place.

I told you that because another name for this film, Triple Hit, is Schrodinger’s Girl, which while is a more relevant title for the movie, really isn’t any better. Maybe the title, like I’m hoping the rest of the movie is, is a work in progress.

On the surface, Triple Hit has a lot of cool things going for it: attractive lead, deep, convoluted story, etc. What I expect people to have a problem with is production value. I try to see through things like that because I believe that just because a film doesn’t have a staggering budget doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit. Triple Hit feels like a rough draft, like a film thrown together to try to solicit money from investors to film the real deal. It looks like something a little less well done than anything you’ve seen on Dr. Who and a little more well done than the Avatar skit Saturday Night Live did a couple of seasons ago.

And I think that’s the thing that frustrated me about the movie: I want to see this film with a staggering budget and at least a Jason Statham level of acting. That’s not to say that the acting in this film was horrible. It wasn’t. Abigail Tartellin did a good job…in 2 of her 3 roles (the soldier version of her just didn’t work), and that can’t be easy. It’s just that the people at Triple Hit have made a movie for a very specific demographic: British sci-fi fans who may or may not care about production value. If this film didn’t seem like a school project it would be loads better, as the story is actually kind of neat.

Triple Hit (2009)