Angel's Dance tries hard to be quirky and different. However, when you strip away the surface veneer, what you have is a darkly humorous reinvention of The Empire Strikes Back and The Karate Kid. The story's protagonists are Steve Rosellini (James Belushi), a Yoda-like assassin, and his pupil Tony (Kyle Chandler), who has been sent to "The Rose" by mafia don Uncle Vinnie to be trained for an important "assignment". In true Mr. Mayagi-like fashion, Rosellini tries to get the impatient and angry young Tony to study Nietzche and warns him that, "nothing is as it seems." Then, just in case we hadn't figured it out, The Rose tells Tony, "I will teach you. It's a Zen master thing." Attempts to make The Rose a more appetizing character – he's a vegetarian, he recycles and believes in reincarnation, so he's not REALLY killing people, only sending them to another plane of existence – may make him a more interesting character, but they don't make him particularly believable. The last time I checked, Zen Buddhists were as opposed to murder as Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus.
Still, this is a movie, and by suspending one's disbelief there is some peculiar fun to be had here, particularly after The Rose gives Tony a test: kill someone – an innocent, chosen at random out of the phone book – to prove that he has the mettle to be Uncle Vinnie's hit man. The sword of Damocles hangs over Angel's neck.
Angel (Sheryl Lee) is a mousy, twitchy, delusional mess. She goes to confession to torture her favourite priest with lurid tales conjured from her Harlequin Romance imagination, then tells her father that she's seeing this wonderful man who listens attentively without judging her. She works the night shift in a mortuary embalming the dead, then frames and hangs photographs of her work on the wall at home. When the priest accepts a post in Uganda, Angel (whose last name is, in the screenwriter's stab at non-irony, Chaste) contemplates suicide. But as she raises the pill bottle to her mouth, a bullet flies through the window and knocks it out of her hand. Angel soon realizes that someone is trying to kill her. You'd think that would be good news for one bent on self-destruction, but Angel suddenly decides she wants to live and the second half of the film follows her quest to turn the tables on her potential assassins.
There is dark and perverse fun in many passages of the film. It turns the conventions of its predecessors on their head, and in Pulp Fiction style, gives us hit men who are oddly sympathetic at times. James Belushi, who fares better than the rather bland Mr. Chandler, clearly relishes this atavistic surfer-dude gun for hire role. Further, Sheryl Lee gives a solid performance of nervous intensity as the intended victim with a plan for revenge.
But, despite the carefully constructed plot twists and good performances, the philosophical centre of this clever work is a little rancid.
