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PLOT: You just know it's not going to end well in this crime drama when two assassins played by Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr., spare their latest target - the pregnant wife of an out-of-control crime boss, Stephen Dorff.
Not very long into the new noir-ish crime drama Shadowboxer, you start wondering exactly what esteemed British actress Helen Mirren is doing in this wacked-out film.
Try about five minutes.
The movie opens with Mirren as an ailing assassin named Rose who is on a steady diet of painkillers and booze to mask her pain and melancholy.
Her much younger partner Mikey, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., shadowboxes as a way of escaping their unusual occupation, and when he comes home to her all sweaty from a good workout, she bathes him.
It's unclear, at least initially, whether Rose and Mikey have a really creepy mother-son relationship or are May-December lovers.
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Following the bathing scene, the movie quickly cuts to a guy spreadeagled, tied down on a pool table with a pool ball in his mouth while a demented crime lord named Clayton, (Stephen Dorff), hovers over him with a pool cue.
What transpires next is downright nasty -- hint: That pool cue is broken in half and inserted into an orifice -- as Dorff accuses his trapped victim of sleeping with his beautiful, sexy wife Vickie (Vanessa Ferlito).
Naturally, the lives of all these truly unlikable people intersect when Dorff hires Rose and Mikey -- through a guy in a wheelchair named Andrew -- to dispose of his pregnant wife.
The problem is that Rose is facing a crisis of conscience: She's on her last days on earth and can't face killing an unborn child.
So literally, in the blink of an eye, Mirren goes from training a gun on Vickie to helping her give birth right there in the bedroom.
Lordy, what will these people think of next!
Try two insane makeout scenes -- including one in a forest -- between Mirren and Gooding later in the film.
The rest of the unfortunate cast, who are now probably wishing they had never said yes to this movie, includes Macy Gray as Vickie's booty-loving best friend, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a black market physician who makes house calls, and comic Mo'Nique as his crack-addicted lover, who is also a nurse.
It's all so cliched in terms of personalities and full of such unbelievable situations that it's often downright laughable. And not in a good way.
First-time director Lee Daniels, who began as a casting director and manager and produced the very good The Woodsman and Monster's Ball, clearly should stick to what he knows or else choose better material to direct.
Daniels' only saving grace is that he didn't write Shadowboxer -- that crowning achievement goes to William Lipz -- which should have gone directly to DVD if there had been any justice.
BOTTOM LINE: Run, don't walk, away from this trashy crime drama that's badly written, full of cliched characters, unbelievable situations, and gets more outrageous by the minute. Not even the usually watchable Helen Mirren can save this melodramatic mess.
(This film is rated 18-A)