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SYNOPSIS:
Claire Dennison (Willa Ford TV's "Dancing with the Stars")
is a beautiful sensuous woman desperate to arouse her husband's
desires. She devises a fantasy role-play game hoping to put
the spark back into their marriage. She sets the scene and
her husband takes the bait...or does he? So consumed with
desire the passion enthralls her but it's not long before
Claire realizes she's playing a dangerous game of seduction
with someone so familiar yet completely unknown. Desperate
to end the affair she tells the stranger the game is over
but for him it's just begun.
MOVIE
REVIEW
With captions like “Love Hurts, Lust Kills”
and “Her desire for passion ignited a deadly game of
seduction” plastered on the DVD, one can already foresee
the amount of cheesiness (and sex) to be expected in Impulse.
(No offense to the copywriter, but captions like that can
be easily used to describe most of the porn movies.)
And
I wasn’t wrong.
The
opening sequences testify to the strong prevalence of sex:
a conundrum of tastefully done shots of hands moving, caressing
thighs and chests. A wide shot shows three naked ladies sitting
near a pool, and a photographer, donning black eyeliner and
nail polish like how all “emo” artistic people
do (stereotype alert!), throwing a hissy fit over some production
error.
We
soon find out that this is actually a photo shoot for a campaign
for Japanese coffee (which doesn’t make sense, but hey,
small plot-hole here, so... forgivable!) and Claire Dennison
(Willa Ford) is at the helm of this major project that isn’t
going so smoothly. Like ALL successful career women, Claire
happens to be linguistically endowed, and even with the presence
of a hired translator (what for, you may ask), she promptly
sprouts fluent Japanese only at the crucial moment.
Of
course, the stereotyping doesn’t end there. Beautiful
Claire’s sex life is also getting monotonous, and she
heeds the advice of an acquaintance at a party to dress up,
role-play to spice things up a little. It also so happens
that she’s married to a bespectacled older man, Jonathan
(Angus MacFadyen), a meek white-collared psychiatrist working
in a state hospital who is a mite too traditional and loves
to therorise everything – including their sex life.
As
such, her role-playing fiasco backfires tremendously, but
all ends well with the couple having a philosophical conversation
about “passion”, “thrills” and an
eponymous “Roberto”, who is described by Jonathan
as a certain Italian gentleman who would “do all kinds
of very bad things to” Claire.
Days passed and after a work trip, alone at a hotel bar and
unable to contact Jonathan, she notices a man who bears an
uncanny resemblance to her husband – except he doesn’t
wear his hair in a stiff, gelled manner, he’s not wearing
spectacles and instead of the usual dowdy monochrome suits,
he’s dressed in a trendy, albeit flamboyant fashion.
She promptly mistakes him for her husband playing the indifferent
and experimental “Roberto”, and falls into a raunchy
game of seduction… until she finds out (in a pivotal
and extremely amusing scene) that they are really just two
different people.
Of
course, “Roberto” whose real name is Simon Philips
(Angus MacFadyen) become royally pissed after being tossed
aside by Claire. He suddenly becomes psychotically obsessed
with her, to the point of flooding her online chat messenger
with “love you-s” (screen name: Roberto3451, how
original), kidnapping and assuming Jonathan’s identity
(but miraculously, still stays flamboyantly attired).
I must say I am a huge fan of the psychological thriller genre
(well, the synopsis seemed to fit the bill), and if there’s
seediness or sex thrown into the mixture, it’s fine
by me as long as the whole concoction is mixed the right way.
However, Impulse is a B-grade soft porn movie layered over
a B-grade movie layered over a trashy romance/sexual/thriller
movie. In other words, it’s crap, and a lot of it.
It
is chockfull of clichés (heck, the whole movie is one
big cliché), cheesy one-liners out of which most are
also crude sexual innuendos (“One moment you are in,
the next, you are out”), mindless sex – I swear
like half of the time, the lead’s bountiful chest is
exposed –, plot-holes, and stereotypes (see above).
I
guess if executed the right way, which means turning three
notches down on the cheesiness, tearing the original script
into shreds and revamping everything, ah yes, Impulse might
have been a success. Oh and well not forgetting, recasting.
Oh
and I forgot to mention: the last few events leading up to
the predictable ending are so moronic and full of plot-holes
that I wouldn’t even bother mentioning them. Go spoil
them for yourself if you are brave enough.
Bottom
line: Impulse sucks.
SPECIAL FEATURES :
Nothing interesting offered in this department, other
than an assortment of 10 preview trailers featuring flicks
ranging from The Tattooist, Untraceable, Cleaner to What Love
is. Also included: a short clip on how “Blu-Ray is High
Definition”. Pretty abysmal extras given that the former
can be downloaded or watched off the Internet, and the latter
is given in almost every DVD anyway.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
Nothing
out of the box in the audio and visual department except the
usual Dolby Digital and Anamorphic Widescreen presentation.
MOVIE
RATING:
 
(Impulse Hurts, Impulse Kills)
DVD
RATING :
(Doesn’t even include basic special features
like interviews or outtakes)
Review
by Casandra Wong
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