Director Card Report: Julius Onah (2015)

Who is Julius Onah? He's a filmmaker you might not have heard of. Well, he's the son of a Nigerian diplomat. After a bunch of short films made all over the world and a little seen debut, he directed a much-hyped but poorly received entry into a popular sci-fi franchise. His third feature, “Luce,” got him the best reviews of his career so far, which seemingly caught the attention of Disney and Marvel. Yes, this is the latest obscure indie director that Marvel has scooped up for one of their high-profile superhero projects. Is Onah a work-for-hire professional with little personal connection to his films – chosen by a big studio because he'd be easy to boss around – or is he actually a distinctive filmmaker with a vision all his own? I decided to find out before watching the new “Captain America” movie. 

1. The Girl Is in Trouble

Being the son of a diplomat who was friends with the Clintons, you would think, would give Julius Onah opportunities and access that other people don't have. And I'm sure it did. However, he maintains his roots were humble. He studied theater in Connecticut and film at NYU. While in school, he made several short films. Most of these are available to watch on his website with a very annoying menu design. Some of these shorts are rather amateurish, with rather ropey acting and some choppy camera work. However, Onah's early work does show a reoccurring interest in how people connect and interact.  As well as voice-over narrations and cleverly edited montages. Of the shorts I watched, the highly personal “Goodbye Chicken, Farewell Goat” and the dialogue-free “Linus” are probably the best. 

It was during this time that Onah also began working as an intern for Spike Lee. Hollywood is all about who you know, naturally, and Lee clearly gave Onah the boost he needed to get his first feature made. That would be “The Girl Is in Trouble” and Spike was an executive producer on it, allowing his name to be slapped on the key art. Not that this did to much to sell the movie. “The Girl Is in Trouble” sat on a shelf for two years before finally finding distribution. Entertainment One would give the film one of its standard, tiny theatrical release and same day/same date VOD release, where it gained very little attention. In fact, I had not heard of the film at all until I looked up its director. In light of his more high-profile later work, it's worth going back and checking out his debut. 

August is a struggling DJ living in New York City, hoping to make his dream come true but unable to get into most clubs. After another disappointing night, he receives a phone call from Sidge, a Swedish singer he met at a club months before. She ends up back at his apartment, the two hooking up. What seems to be a simple booty call soon turns into something much darker. Sidge has a video on her cell phone of a man murdering another man. She claims to have recorded it the night before during a date gone wrong. August recognizes the dead man in the video as Jesus, the brother of drug dealer, Angel. Angel is well aware of what happened too, looking for the people responsible for killing his brother. The strangler in the clip is Nicholas, the son of a rich but crooked Wall Street banker. August debates over whether to trust Sidge as the vengeful Angel increasingly closes in on them. 

One of the earliest scenes in “The Girl Is in Trouble” is also one of its most interesting. In one of many voice over monologues, August describes how he knows Signe. How she is a girl he met at a bar, got her number, but never got a call back. This opens up a web of connections he has with all the other characters in the plot, most of them he knows strictly through social media. This raises an intriguing question. In this era when so much of our social interactions happen through screens, how do you truly define a “friend?” Because you added someone on Facebook or Instagram deson't mean that you can trust them or that they have any special loyalty to you. The brief glimpses we get at these social media profiles are already hilariously dated, resembling old Myspace profiles. However, considering what personal connections and friendships mean in our computerized age is certainly worth asking. 

Unfortunately, this scene is also the only time “The Girl Is in Trouble” actually considers that idea. Instead of looking at modern issues, it is much more concerned with looking back. The film is more about invoking classical film noir tropes. The title is also a one sentence summary of more than a few classic noirs, often starting with a woman in peril. The titular girl is also the archetypal femme fatale. Sidge is beautiful and uses her sex appeal to manipulate men, while her own loyalties remain impossible to determine. August is an everyman protagonist who gets in over his head, a simple act of kindness soon involving him in a crime land saga of sex, drugs, and murder. And there's no guarantees of who will make it out of this story alive. 

The piece of evidence driving the plot of “The Girl Is in Trouble” is a video recording of a murder. This is a murder mystery where we seem to have concrete evidence of who the killer is from the beginning. Instead, the mystery comes from figuring out the exact circumstances that lead to that murder. When that is finally revealed in the last third, it seems a lot more reasonable than we might expect. That proceeds another death, the motivation of which is also rather understandable, albeit in a totally different way. Ultimately, “The Girl Is in Trouble” runs with the very noir-like idea that every crime is justifiable by those that commit them, given the circumstances. 

While Onah clearly has some interesting thoughts in mind about playing with noir conventions and the nature of crime, “The Girl Is in Trouble” forgets an important ingredient: Making a coherent plot filled with characters that we actually care about. While that early montage about social media is one of the film's best moments, it also drops a lot of names, faces, and information on us. The details go by so quickly that it's a bit tricky to keep track of everything. Unfortunately, all those different parts are integral to “The Girl Is in Trouble's” storyline. The script simply has too many moving parts. The inclusion of drugs all throughout the story – seemingly every character casually snorts some lines – or the role of investment banking in the script all seem to be specific commentary on various issues. How it connects in a meaningful way to the rest of the plot is less apparent. By the time a foul-mouthed sex worker wanders into the plot, I was truly wondering what the importance of all these plot points are.

Within “The Girl is in Trouble's” web of storylines are several subplots that remain hopelessly undeveloped. August and Sidge form a romance of sorts. Obviously, the first interaction we see between them is physically intimate. However, as the story progresses, it is clear that August actually starts to like the girl. This is despite her own erratic behavior, that includes pointing a knife at him at one point. A man falling for an obviously dangerous woman and overlooking clear red flags because he's enamored is probably the most common plot device in all of noir. However, Sidge still seems to be a character that changes with the whims of the story. This leaves the love story, what would otherwise be the centerpiece of the plot, hopelessly uninvolving. Why does August fall for this girl so hard? We never truly find out.

There are signs of a bigger story here. August mentions his hand shaking at one point, but that he has no funds to see a doctor, a bit of information that is never brought up again. He dreams of becoming a DJ, while Sidge wants to be a singer. There is this thought throughout the film that it's hard out there for an artist these days, that trying to live in New York while working in the creative fields is an economic impossibility. Similarly, Jesus turns back to dealing drugs right after getting out of prison because he has no other prospects. This is in contrast with the rich kid Nicholas. While these discussions of economic and class divides are interesting, they never emerge into a worthwhile point. In fact, “The Girl Is in Trouble” doesn't seem to be making any clear statement about class divides aside from how much they suck.

Most of the characters are immigrants and that's a bit of attempted social commentary too. Sidge is Swedish, Angel and Jesus have roots in the Dominican Republic, and Nicholas' family were European Jews that came to New York decades ago. August, meanwhile, is from Nigeria, an attribute he shares with the film's director. (Making you wonder if August isn't something of an author's surrogate.) That means “The Girl Is in Trouble” is also a movie about coming from another culture to New York. This element also doesn't develop into a coherent point. However, it is more interesting, as it so clearly reflects the director's personal experience. There's a lot more detail and color to this side of the script and it's no doubt because Onah was drawing from putting his own lived experiences in. 

Life as a member of multiple cultures was a reoccurring theme in Onah's short films. You see a few of his other trademarks from his early work making its way into his debut. “The Girl Is in Trouble” features a lot of voice over narration from the protagonist, a device Onah utilized in several of his shorts. This is paired with interestingly edited montages, sometimes with text on-screen, something else he did a lot. Presumably as a shout-out to the movie's executive producer, Onah also includes several of the dolly-shots that are the visual quirk everyone knows from Spike Lee. That was a nice touch.

Aside from Lee, the other recognizable name above the title on the poster is Wilmer Valderrama. Ya know, Fez from “That's '70s Show.” Valderrama has, inconceivably, managed to successfully reinvent himself as a tough guy character actor in the years since his sitcom days. That's the mode Valderrama is operating in here, giving a perfectly serviceable performance as Angel, a violent thug with a sense of honor about his family. He's not the star of the movie though. That would be Columbus Short, best known for the television series “Scandal” and the “Stomp the Yard” movies, I guess. Short is likable enough, managed to insert a degree of understated charisma into the character of August. That's more than Alicja Bachleda can do as Signe. She makes for a convincing unhinged woman of questionable morals but can't bring any further complexity to the part. 

Ultimately, “The Girl Is in Trouble” is the kind of indie movie we don't exactly have a shortage of. It's a genre riff with an ensemble cast, using some cultural specificity to help sell a movie without much star wattage. We get roughly a dozen of those every year and most of them go straight-to-VOD and aren't seen by many people. (Sometimes they get slapped with advertising artwork that present gritty crime dramas as if they were shoot-em-up action movies, a marketing deception that never fails to amuse me.) This is probably why “The Girl Is in Trouble” sat on the shelf for a while before slipping out into the public. It's not a terrible movie. It actually shows some promise. However, a muddled screenplay and a lack of distinct characters ultimately makes it a deeply forgettable experience. [Grade: C]