Review by Tim-O
Directed by Eric Colley
Starring Daniel Magill
GPS: The Movie is a hard movie to review. It has a lot of good and a lot of bad in it throughout. It’s one of those movies that had me constantly debating whether or not to turn it off but it also had enough interesting plot points and twists to keep me going and give it a chance until the end. I’m going to list the things I liked and didn’t like about the movie separately and let you, the reader, decide whether or not I actually liked it because I’m still debating that, too.
The good: The plot of GPS is really it’s strong point, to me. The movie centers on a group of people who go on GPS-led treasure hunts where the clues are GPS coordinates left for them to follow. Motivated by the possibility of finding two million dollars in cash, the group, led by Andrew (Daniel Magill), find themselves in the backwoods of the Northwest. Their search leads them to the discovery of a coffin filled with pictures of an abducted woman, with the coordinates to supposedly find her. This leads the group to a further series of cryptic clues and coordinates obviously designed to disorientate and draw them further into the wilderness for some mysterious and nefarious end. There’s also a killer, clad all in black, picking off members of the group one by one as they get separated. Who is the kidnapped girl in the photos? Who is the mysterious killer? Where are the clues and coordinates leading our hapless treasure hunters? Pretty interesting stuff, right?
The bad: The acting and “feel” of the film are really uneven. Characters who are supposed to be funny and endearing end up being annoying and too goofy to be believable. Characters who are supposed to be darker “red herrings” aren’t fooling anybody. The lead (Daniel Magill) is a decent actor but his character is just plain boring and doesn’t have enough charisma to carry his role in the story. The movie sways back and forth between a competent and amateur feel, too. It almost seems like it had multiple directors directing the actors. The camera work suffers from the same issues as well. Also, there’s a really weird cop wondering around the woods with blood on him who pops in and out with no warning who seems to be worried about some killer bear or something. I have no idea what his purpose to the story was. Maybe I missed it, but he seemed more bizarre and out of place than the cop from Cabin Fever. Really, what the heck was the point to him?
The ugly: The writing and editing of GPS are really weak, in my opinion. I found myself becoming confused and ultimately frustrated with trying to follow what was happening and who it was happening to. Something interesting would happen and then trail off into nowhere and all the sudden the killer would pop out and do his thing. Characters would be introduced and then show up so much later in the film that I forgot who they were. Some would be absent for an extended time and just reappear with little or no explanation. I guess the filmmakers were going for more red herring moments. Although it just made things confusing to the point I had convinced myself that they were killed and I must have missed it or, even worse, that I forgot the kills happened at all. The biggest disappointment for me was the end and final reveal. My reaction to the killer(s), and reasoning behind everything that was happening was one of, “What the hell?!? Where did THAT come from? Did I just miss the build up to this? People are dying because of…?!? You did who in the what now?!?” It’s a pretty big eye roller and made me a little angry for trying to follow a story where the killer has such moronic motivations. (In fairness, I guess Jason Voorhees should be over it by now, too, but he has that cool zombie thing going on for him) In the end, GPS is a movie that implies that you are watching a horror film and completely fails to deliver in the 3rd act and (not unlike when you’re talking to someone, laugh, and a huge snot ball flies out of your nose and attaches itself to your cheek)… I hate it when that happens.
For all of it’s shortcomings, though, I’m going to give GPS: The Movie a rating of 5 out of 10. Why, you ask? Well, because I really like the idea of the story and I get the sense that the cast and crew really did the best they could with what they had to work with. Plus, it kept me watching until the end to see what the point of it all was. In the world of low budget filmmaking, that’s a huge task to achieve. Yes, the acting is uneven but I doubt Tom Hanks or Sean Penn were available or willing to come out for fun and beef up the project. I’ve seen much worse acting with much bigger budgets, though. If only the script was more coherent and the back story would have had a darker, more “true horror”, element to it, GPS could have really been a winner. 5/10