Written and Directed by Brady Hall
Starring Elizabeth Cotter, Emily Gateley, Ryan Postell
Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes
Debuting theatrically and on VOD Feb. 19

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Burn it All, written and directed by Brady Hall, is a movie I had to take a day off from and sort of digest before I could commit to how exactly I felt about it. The film’s problem, I feel, is that it’s conflicted--conflicted in tone, in message, in delivery. Howard Hawks’ over-simplified description of a great movie is this: Three great scenes, no bad ones. As long as a movie has three great scenes, and no bad ones, it is, simply put, a great movie. Burn it All has three very well-done scenes, but is surrounded by a rest of a film varying in quality and tonal whiplash from one element to the next. 

My favorite scenes are as follows: 

1. The film begins with Alex (Elizabeth Cotter) arriving home after a long time away because of the death of her mother. She finds that he mother’s corpse has been stolen, for the purpose of black market organ harvesting, and after a violent confrontation with some “pawns” (there’s a lot of chess analogy in this movie), she has a long walk and talk with the facility’s housekeeper, Donna (played by Elena Flory-Barnes). They talk about family, their histories, and just sort of have an intimate moment together where they share what it is that makes each other tick. 

2. Alex has a confrontation with the black market operations’ “Bishop,” a higher-up who manages a small crew. As the bad guy, the first of many iterations to personify this faceless evil, they have a quiet moment together to just talk. It’s interesting that the best moments in Burn it All are the quiet ones. Bishop, like Donna, is a sadly under-utilized character. More Bishop and more Donna could have carried the film a lot further. 

3. After Alex is reunited with her sister Jenny, the two of them quietly bury their mother and it’s very well-done. It’s a slow-mo montage, photographed in a golden sunrise, and a lot is said without having to utilize any dialogue. A lot of the neon shots of interiors throughout the film made me think the filmmakers were going for a Nicolas Winding-Refn vibe, but the storytelling through action, and not dialogue, was perhaps the most effective nod. 

These three scenes were enough to elevate the hit-or-miss material for me. The problem, as I said, was in tonal inconsistencies. It has these great little quiet moments, but doesn’t quite earn them. The movie isn’t a brutal indictment of toxic masculinity, although it does talk about it a lot. It feels more like a typical 1980s-style action movie, with a reluctant hero, like a John McClane, or a John Rambo, given a feminist bent. And because of that, you have action set pieces that don’t totally work. Alex, we learn, served in the military after completing basic training, and was kicked out for drug use. But when she kicks into action, she is a machine, capable of great amounts of unrestrained murder. How did she get so good at killing? She seems to have great training beyond boot camp, or possibly just a knack for it. We understand her tragic background, the abuse she’s suffered at the hands of many men, but it all feels very surface and perfunctory. We never really get to know Alex, beyond her trauma. She’s acerbic and witty and furiously violent. She has the makings of a great character, but the investment in developing those traits just isn’t there.

At 100 minutes or so, Burn it All is too long. Thankfully, I will say, it’s not a boring movie. The worst thing a low-budget movie can be is boring. Burn it All never commits that cardinal sin. I think it would have benefitted from a little less time being dedicated to the story of the black market organ harvesters (because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, Elizabeth Cotter is driving the story forward with her performance), and more focus on our heroine. It could have been a bit leaner. A bit meaner. A bit more concise in its delivery. Yes, it talks a lot about the horrible things that men do to women--and in a bit of perhaps unintentional humor, a dying bad guy, gurgling blood, manages his last word to be the dreaded “C”-word--but saying those things doesn’t lend any insight into those things. The movie seems to abhor real-life violence while reveling in simulated violence. Instead of being about a feminist version of a reluctant hero, she just simply is one. It doesn’t subvert any well-known tropes, or provide criticism to the action genre as a whole. 

Burn it All is an intriguing, ambitious attempt that’s isn’t quite successful. It’s also not worth writing off entirely. I watched it and I enjoyed it. And I would recommend it. But I feel like the movie settles for less when it could have very easily been more. There’s a great movie in the works with Burn it All, but what we got was a fun one.