Crappy film

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

There are two really good things here. First, the facilitating idea, which is way more interesting than the stock revenge theme (as you get in a million other films from Conan to Colombiana). Contrary to other reviews here, it's entirely possible to get an injury like this and survive. Quite often happens in fact. Not surprisingly it can cause mental problems thereafter, not necessarily these particular mental problems, which I won't go into to avoid unnecessary spoilers, but trust me, there's nothing unbelievable about this aspect.Second really good thing: Zoe Bell. Yes she's not going to win a best actress Oscar, neither is she a poor actress. What's needed in a film like this is not Meryl Streep, but someone who looks like they can do the fighting/action stuff. Bell looks like she can because she actually can, and she does the acting bits in between just fine. Way more convincing in a part like this than skinny female stars like that other Zoe, Ms Saldana (again in Colombiana) and yes, more convincing than a lot of male actors who get called on to do this stuff.Other than that, the support acting is only OK, the dialogue is average to uninspired, and the film is very short, but the story's fine and the fights are well-staged. It's all-around competent enough and a lot more convincing and enjoyable than all-action movies (with both male and female leads) with far higher IMDb scores. Well worth a watch if you like this kind of thing.

This movie was written by comic book scribe Ed Brubaker and it really does look and feel like a modern comic. Some of the surface elements like dialog, attitude and characterization are okay. The storytelling fundamentals that lie underneath all that, like plot, theme and story structure, are outright terrible. Angel of Death never gives you a reason to care about anything that happens in it and has so little to say that it starts repeating itself before it's half over.Eve (Zoe Bell) is an assassin who murders a young girl and gets stabbed in the brain when an assignment goes wrong. She begins seeing visions of her young victim, commanding her to start killing bad people. Not all the bad people, though. Eve's lover/handler Prescott (Brian Poth) and Eve's nearly pre-pubescent assassin partner Franklin (Justin Huen) are never threatened by Eve's visions, even though they are just as evil as anyone else in the movie. Instead,s he sets her sights on a couple of generically undefined mob bosses and…well, it gets a bit hard to describe after that.Not that Angel of Death is all that complex. It's simplistic on just about every level but there's less and less logic to the film as it goes along, in the sense of point A leading to point B leading to point C. Characters are introduced that serve no purpose. Other characters that are important don't show up until the film is halfway over. The plot so completely runs out of steam it has to manufacture three separate reasons for why Eve should want to kill out of revenge, even though the whole point of the story is that she isn't seeking personal revenge.Now, an action movie can get by with a cruddy plot if it keeps cranking up the intensity as it goes along, but Angel of Death screws that up. The best action scene take place before the film is half over and nothing that comes after is even close to being as energetic or violent. Intensity-wise, this thing climaxes way too early and then lies flaccid on the screen till it peters out with a conclusion that seems to happen about 15 minutes before the story should actually finish. By that time, however, you're just glad it's over.I knew this film was going to suck from the very start, when it tried to tart up Eve in sexy clothes and a wig. Zoe Bell is a somewhat handsome woman with a tough charisma, but she's no beauty and when she's glammed up, she look less like La Femme Nikita and more like a transsexual. Putting their lead actress on screen in a way that makes her look as bad as she can told me these filmmakers didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. That assumption was only confirmed by the rest of the movie.Like most modern super-hero comics, Angel of Death has an intriguing concept and some of the individual moments of the story are well pulled off, but the tale as a whole is a mess that goes nowhere with no aim. There's also no nudity, relatively little profanity and most of the violence is on the tame side. Leave this one alone.

Zoe Bell will never be the action star that Angelina Jolie is, but that shouldn't keep you from watching her in action.She plays a mob hit-woman that has a change of heart after an on-the-job accident. She decides to get some justice for those she has wronged. I know, it sounds a little hokey, but no more that surviving a knife stuck in your skull.There are a lot of fights here. Of course, Bell is the star and should win, but, come on, win a straight fight against someone twice her size> Well, that's what you pay your money to see, so that's what you get.Will the Angel of Death return? They left the door open.

Ed Brubaker is a name to know in comics, but it should also be known in movies. Hopefully this will be a good calling card for him to get more work, or for more of his comics to reach the screen. While he's usually known for his spin on Captain America, he also has a series of hard-hitting hard-boiled comics called 'Criminal' (at the moment, I think, there's three volumes in all). Angel of Death follows along on the heels of those latter comics, and what he delivers here with this script is like an updating of a pulpy story that might have been found back in the 1950s put to film - only, of course, far less violent and expletive or on occasion trippy. It's like a Sin City yarn if it took itself not quite as much as a parody. And it works, mostly.And another good thing about it, with its story about a hit-woman (Zoe Bell) who after getting a knife stabbed in her head and surviving- and becoming a loose cannon and seeing visions of a young girl she accidentally killed "telling her" to hit the entire mob organization around her- is that it leads on tough-movie dialog, kick-ass fight scenes and a really superb leading lady. Previously one could see Bell as a stunt-woman in Kill Bill or as herself, sorta, in Death Proof. But here she proves she can hold her own in dramatic scenes (maybe not quite her Uma Thurman counterpart but close enough) and seeing her fight is really extraordinary.In fact, if you're just looking for a better-than-average direct-to-DVD action flick that chalks up a load of mob-movie/detective clichés, and don't know or care about Brubaker's name on the DVD, it's still worth watching. The fights are gritty and realistic, and the direction compliments these moments of torrid psycho-drama with Bell's knack for knocking someone's head in or any other kind of clever way of killing at a moment's notice. The film sometimes goes into a comic-book-panel kind of mis-en-scene, like if Zoe Bell's character is in a room walking around we'll see three different 'panels' of this. It's creative, if a little overused (and not so original if one's seen Ang Lee's Hulk). And, as a more obvious complaint, with the exception of Doug Jones and Lucy Lawless most of the cast is just 'meh', not terrible but nothing special.But pick it up if you're roving around your video rental or if netflix gives the recommendation. You'll be surprised how much 78 minutes can go in delivering a hard-knock story of hard kills and harder consequences.