C.O.O.L.I.O (Paul Cahalane, 2012) - 1 star

The day before going to the C.O.O.L.I.O. premiere at London’s Barbican, a friend asked me what the film was about. I couldn’t answer him then, and now having experienced the film, I still can’t give an informed answer. C.O.O.L.I.O. is writer/director Paul Cahalane’s debut (and hopefully final) feature, a messy love letter to Guy Ritchie, whose contents involve London gangsters, time travel and a complete lack of coherence.

But what makes C.O.O.L.I.O. so unwatchable? Is it its bombardment of uninteresting, undeveloped characters poorly realized by terrible acting? Is it its embarrassingly low production value and technical skill? Or is it its absolute disregard for story and structure?

Clearly a fan of Ritchie’s classics, Cahalane has opted for a brash voiceover to accompany the action, but from the first line to the last, it is unfortunately clear that he wrote (what he thought were snappy) one-liners, which ultimately are not linked to each other thematically, or at all helpful in aiding the plot. At times we are told information that, having suffered through all 150 minutes of the film, now appear redundant or, on the other end of the spectrum, we watch someone mime their emotions while a voiceover tells us exactly how they are feeling; one of the cardinal sins of voiceovers, and the biggest giveaway that a performance has not given the audience enough. When opting for onscreen dialogue, the performances are just not entertaining or well-executed enough for audiences to care about the characters, leaving little incentive to detect a story in the chaos. And when Cahalane’s own imagination ran dry, he simply filled scenes with pre-existing film quotations, from Forrest Gump, Dirty Harry and even Snatch-ing a whole scene from Guy Ritchie!

My lack of attention to the plot here seems to mirror the director’s, in that scenes are not scenes in the traditional sense, but simply brief exchanges, which have little grounding or reason, and seem to have been ordered at random. Almost every moment of action is followed by yet another song accompanied by a poorly stylized and less than pointless music video montage. There is no hint at a three-act structure to say the least, and with a consistent lack of purpose, I found myself assuming (and wanting) each scene to be the last.

 However, there is clearly ambition here. Paul Cahalane, who also produces, films, edits, mixes and scores the film, clearly has a vision: to take the London gangster flick and make it high concept. There is, regrettably, one thing stopping him: he has no idea how to do any of the things listed above. With pictures going from stark black and white to full colour every few seconds for no apparent reason, the aspect ratio similarly fluctuating, and footage from Gran Turismo being edited in, his technical skills disappointingly seem to parallel his creative ones.

The one positive I can draw from this otherwise abysmal feature is that the budget was clearly relatively high, and therefore if this got funding, then there’s hope for us all as film makers! On a final note, a game I played to pass the time during the screening was to hazard a guess at the titular acronym’s meaning. I can only assume this: Cahalane Omni-destructive On Lackluster & Ignorant Ordeal. Answers on a postcard please!