Review: My Name is Modesty

Alexandra Staden is Modesty Blaise, a casino worker in the employ of an underworld figure named Louche (Valentin Teodosiu). A group of terrorists headed by Miklos (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) storm the casino, kill Louche, take everyone hostage, and threaten to bump them off unless someone gives them the combination to open the casino vault. Modesty, protective of her co-workers assures Miklos that Louche’s chief lieutenant (Raymond Cruz) is the only one who can get into the vault, and they must wait for his arrival. In the meantime, she uses her wits to play a game of roulette; Every time Miklos wins, the mysterious Modesty must tell him a story about herself, usually about her rough upbringing as an orphan in Bosnia. Every time Modesty wins three in a row, a hostage will be released.

 

You’ll have to excuse my ignorance, for I have not heard of the comic strip that this 2004 film directed by Scott Spiegel is based on. Hell, looking at the title character’s name alone (Modesty Blaise), I assumed the last name was pronounced ‘blasé’ not ‘blaze’. Having now watched the film, I struggle to see how this film (if it is any indication of the comic) would’ve worked in an enjoyable or exciting fashion in its original form. There’s potential for a sexy and fun female Bond, Saturday matinee adventure, but the script and structure are counterproductive.

 

The film is mostly told in flashbacks apparently detailing a pre-history to the character of the comic strip, whilst the wrap-around is Staden’s title character telling her back-story whilst she and others are held hostage to terrorist Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and his cronies. So, on the one hand, you have a stagy and inert wraparound structure, and on the other hand are snippets of the story of how Modesty came to be. The flashbacks are really the main plot, with a hostage situation that really could’ve been changed to just about anything else without it mattering a damn. Exciting and rollicking adventure, it ain’t. Why the fuck wasn’t the film about the person Modesty became? Surely it would provide far more adventure, energy and excitement than her war-torn, orphaned upbringing. I would’ve spent ten minutes on that stuff at the beginning of the film, and then just moved forward to Modesty being the street-smart arse-kicker she is touted as. We never really get to see how formidable she actually is, because she’s either seen as a useless, unskilled orphan, or stuck negotiating the release of hostages via a combination of roulette (Sadly not even Russian) and storytelling, which ends up like a gambling addict’s idea of ‘Truth or Dare’. And the film has a strangely uncertain position on the reliability of Blaise’s tales anyway that kinda renders much of it bloody pointless.

 

I’ve heard that this Miramax released, ‘Quentin Tarantino presents’ film was meant to be almost a film version of a TV pilot for a prospective ‘Modesty Blaise’ series. The film failed and the series never eventuated, probably because this is more of a ‘proposal’ or ‘studio pitch’ than a real film. And it sucks, so that doesn’t help.

 

Coster-Waldau (who has since perfected an English accent on TV’s enjoyable “Game of Thrones”) is pretty good as the handsome villain, but the stagy nature of the film renders his character less interesting and less menacing the longer the film goes on. Not to mention, there’s no way on Earth a terrorist would let a hostage go so long as they promised never to tell anyone. Yeah, right. Still, it surprises me the guy has never quite broken out as a star, because he’s handsome, charismatic, and even as early as this film, his grasp of the English language was perfectly fine.

 

Lead actress Staden seems more like a model than an actress, albeit a horribly skinny and frankly plain-looking model. She speaks English fluently, but not expressively. She’s awfully wooden and her character isn’t nearly as interesting or charming as Spiegel and writers Lee and Janet Scott Batchler seem to want us to think. She’s like a mixture of James Bond, Lara Croft, and Anne Frank, without any of the interesting qualities they each have. Sure, she has underworld ties, but those aren’t as heavily emphasised as I would’ve liked. For the most part she just seems like a casino worker and protective mother hen to her fellow employees. I was expecting something closer to “Cleopatra Jones”, what we get is like “Die Hard” if Bruce Willis had gotten caught and rounded up with the other hostages. And all that stuff about a rough upbringing in the Balkans bored me shitless. The film is also horribly tame for something brandishing the names Quentin Tarantino (“Kill Bill”, “Grindhouse”) and Scott Spiegel (a Sam Raimi chum who worked on “Evil Dead II”). Someone might like this film, but I certainly didn’t get much from it. I sure hope the Peter O’Donnell comic strip was more entertaining than this.

 

Rating: C-