In Action

Directed by Sean Kenealy and Eric Silvera, In Action follows friends Sean (Kenealy) and Eric (Silvera) as they decide to write an action movie together and subsequently find themselves drawn into a larger-than-life, genre-specific scenario. It’s a fairly workable premise that is, by and large, employed to distressingly underwhelming and uninvolving effect by Kenealy and Silvera, as the filmmakers, working from their own screenplay, deliver a low-rent endeavor that suffers from an almost total lack of compelling, interesting elements – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by Kenealy and Silvera’s ceaseless emphasis on tedious, small-talk-like dialogue (and it doesn’t help, certainly, that the two men are hardly able to generate the laughs for which they’re clearly striving). And while Kenealy and Silvera are admittedly able to wring a fair amount of better-than-expected production value out of their shoestring budget, with the animated sequences and impressive use of special effects ranking high on the film’s minimal list of positive attributes, In Action does, ultimately and for the most part, feel like a shot-on-weekends experiment that holds little, if any, appeal for viewers without any personal connection to the (presumably affable) filmmakers.

* out of ****