Directed by Jon Abrahams
Written by Michael Testone
Starring Jon Abrahams, Mark Webber, Chazz Palminteri and Nicole Elizabeth Berger
MPAA rating: R for violence and language
Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes

by Audrey Callerstrom

During the late 1990s, after Pulp Fiction broke genre conventions, combining humor with violence and a soundtrack that exists as its own piece of art, lots of other filmmakers followed suit. Sometimes they did so with success, like Doug Liman did with Go. Sometimes it felt like the films were tailor-made specifically for the college boy demographic and no one else, like The Boondock Saints. You can’t just throw violence in our face, play a good song, kill off a bunch of people, include a snarky remark, and expect that your audience is still engaged, no matter how much your audience loves Willem Dafoe (and I do).

Clover fits into the latter category. I don’t even think it belongs in 2020. I think this should be a faded VHS that’s collecting dust at a Goodwill somewhere. Clover is the second collaboration between director/star Jon Abrahams (the Skeet Ulrich-type boyfriend in Scary Movie), and writer Michael Testone. Clover, in spite of a promising start with a monologue by Ron Perlman about apex predators, is a contrived mess about two Irish brothers who own a bar (sadly, not Paddy’s Pub) which they lose in a bet. After fighting over who screwed up more, Jackie (Mark Webber) and Mickey (Jon Abrahams) fall down a rabbit hole of owing money, doing favors and getting in over their heads with Italian mob boss Tony Davolo (Chazz Palminteri), who operates out of the basement of a bowling alley. A job gone wrong brings them to precocious teen Clover (Nicole Elizabeth Berger). Get it? Her name is Clover? They’re Irish? Oof.

In one scene, Tony is talking to two people whom we don’t see. He is hiring them to kill Mickey and Jackie. They are the best in the business. The camera turns and – gasp! – the two people he was talking to are women (Erika Christensen and Julia Jones). See what I mean about this film actually being from 1999? It’s gags like that. Not only are they women, but they’re also lesbians (tee-hee!) who argue about what kind of pizza oven they want to buy while they clean their guns. Jessica Szohr from Piranha and TV’s “Gossip Girl” shows up as Jackie’s love interest to be killed off almost immediately. For each death, we feel nothing. We never knew the person. Aside from everyone insisting they’ve known each other forever, we’re never invested in a single character, aside from perhaps the perpetually annoyed mob boss Pat (Tichina Arnold), one of the few actors who leaves the film unscathed. The same can’t be said for Webber or Abrahams, especially with lines like “Someone wants us dead. The real dead.” Nicole Elizabeth Berger is also clunky as Clover, especially during scenes of melodrama that seem extracted from a different movie. The idea is that the brothers become guardians of Clover and that they care for her, and they become their own little rag-tag team, but it never quite gels. Arguably all these characters could explode and it would be like “oh. Weird.”

I didn’t know anything about Clover going in, only the plot synopsis and that Ron Perlman was prominently featured on the poster, in spite of only being in two scenes. Shortly before the film’s end, there is a twist. To say it was a twist I didn’t see coming is accurate, but only because I found it hard to pay attention. It’s hard to praise Clover, but I will. An earlier scene in the film shows inspiration, where Mickey, Jackie and Clover are walking through the streets to a retro-inspired score, frames rotating to show the passage of time. Although the character, Terry (Jake Weber) is irksome, his peculiar affinity for manufacturing poisons and calling each of them his “children” is amusing. These moments are, of course, fleeting, lost in a below-average, manufactured, wannabe-black comedy that any of us could surpass in quality given the time and resources.

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