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*/**** starring Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Reed Diamond written by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach directed by Christopher Landon
by Walter Chaw The distaff version of last year’s Carry-On, which was itself the umpteenth redux of Phone Booth, Christopher “Son of Michael” Landon’s Drop does the “I can see you/have you checked on the children?” mambo in a high-rise restaurant setting with young widow and single mother Violet (Meghann Fahy), who’s wading back into the dating pool with app match Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Her hipster sister Jen (Violett Beane) is holding down the fort at home, babysitting Violet’s adorable but deeply traumatized–in an adorable way–son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), who, we learn through a series of flashbacks, once had a gun pointed at him by his mentally unbalanced, now-dead dad. Is this a surprisingly dark development for a breezy, moth-eaten, high-concept entertainment that is otherwise as smooth and frictionless as a baby’s ass? Sure!
It’s potentially interesting that Violet is not, per convention, an ex-Green Beret or MMA instructor or some other stealth badass but instead a victim of horrific domestic abuse known for having murdered her abuser. In other words, she is “notorious” rather than a sleeping bear that shouldn’t be poked, and her superpower appears to be an ability to survive severe trauma at the hands of vicious men. And yet, if there’s a message here, I worry it’s the wrong kind of message. Especially as Violet hasn’t actually killed her ex but…well, the truth is substantially worse, though at least it leads to a fun resolution where the abused and broken child gets to play the hero with a real gun and a toy car. Shocked? Yeah, it’s gross, but Maggie once shot Mr. Burns, so who am I to judge? What is good and what is bad anymore? Who still cares to parse the difference?
Violet is nervous on her date. Henry is also nervous. Weird old dude Richard (Reed Diamond), who seems nice but offends his own blind date so volcanically that our antennae are aroused if we’re still paying attention, is nervous. It’s the first night on the job for Violet and Henry’s flamboyant waiter, Matt (Jeffery Self), thus he is nervous, too; and the drunk pianist, Phil (Ed Weeks), acts nervous so that later, when he has a reason to be nervous, you can’t tell if he’s nervous because he’s nervous or nervous because he’s part of it. The “it” being a fiendish plot that begins with memes and other vibesy shit getting “dropped” onto Violet’s phone by someone in the restaurant. They tell her to do stupid shit up until they pivot and let her know they have eyes on her son. Unless she does exactly as she’s told, little Toby will be killed.
Since the baddies are literally asking Violet over the phone if she knows where her child is, I thought it would be cool if Carol Kane showed up as one of the villains in an even more overt shoutout to When a Stranger Calls. Honestly, I don’t know whether I really think that’s a good idea or Carol Kane would just make me less bored. Where was I? Oh, right: Violet tries to do stuff like “call 9-1-1,” but they’ve cloned her phone. Every inch of the restaurant has surveillance cameras as well, meaning she’s SOL when it comes to sneaking messages to other women in the washroom or Phil the pianist. Violet needs to play along–and, à la Trap, Drop keeps up with its premise for a good 40 minutes before the narrative ingenuity dries up and she ends up pulling a Liam Neeson on her home invaders back at the house.
Drop squanders all of its imagination on making its foundation as ugly as possible in the mistaken belief that the catharsis would prove more satisfying if the human cruelty were more pronounced. I don’t mind a bit of child endangerment in my exploitation, but finding a cutesy way of giving Toby a moment that will ostensibly cure him of his harrowing memories of THAT NIGHT Daddy went bonkers and painted the kitchen with his brains is unearned, at the very least. I thought about René Manzor’s Deadly Games, a movie I love that features both child and elder abuse in its tale of a killer Santa Claus and the resourceful little fucker who saves the day. What’s the difference between the two films? Why do I love one and not the other?
It has a lot to do with how Drop uses serious subjects like domestic abuse, mental illness, and suicide as plot points in a script that thinks it’s being cute by combining the romcom with Phone Booth but isn’t, mainly because first dates/blind dates/Internet dates are terrifying enough without the secret assassins. For Landon, who previously helmed the wacky mash-ups Happy Death Day and Freaky, this is evidence of going to the well once too often. Slashing a dead horse? (Yeah, shoulda quit while I was ahead, too.) Deadly Games, meanwhile, doesn’t airdrop a broken shell of a boy into the middle of a wild-date movie as a deus ex machina and then tack on a happy ending, complete with a second meet-cute for its beleaguered couple. In one film, the kid is the real hero; in the other, he’s a prop used to illicit cheap emotion, manufacture false tension, and provide pilfered and hollow stakes. And, well, fuck that.
