The Deaths of Ian Stone

 It's been a while since I've seen a movie that's so clearly a child of the '00s as British horror-adjacent opus The Deaths of Ian Stone. The desaturated pallete, aggressive editing and camerawork, the chintzy electronic music, the visual references... The first couple of minutes, which include an artfully distressed title card, reminded me so much of the infamous "You Wouldn't Steal A Car" piracy advert it got a disbelieving belly laugh out of me.

 Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) is a twenty-something hockey player who's grumpy because he gets puckus interruptus out of scoring a winning goal(?) on a technicality from an evil referee. Seriously, the referee is canonically evil. It's that sort of movie.
 Other than that mishap, his life seems pretty good, which makes it fairly off-putting as he whinges to his beautiful girlfriend (Christina Cole) on the ride home about how bad he has it. But I guess he was on to something; After he drops her off a mysterious, a vaguely grim-reaper-like shape lures him off his car and kills him at a railroad crossing.

 This is not the end for Ian, as he wakes from a nap on an office desk. He now works at an office where his girlfriend is just a co-worker, and lives in a huge, multi-story central London loft with another woman, Medea (Jaime Murray). But his previous life still haunts him, and weird shit keeps happening. It comes to a head when a random creep (Michael Feast) accosts him, claiming to know what's going on... and is dragged into the shadows before he can actually explain anything by the same dark-shrouded beings that killed Hokey Ian. Soon Ian is dead again and a new, different life starts, a few more wrinkles are added to the plot, then he dies again, and so on.

 This is not a good film by most reasonable metrics, but the way writer Brendan Hood and director Dario Piana carefully unspool their fantasy is kind of endearing: it's like an over-enthusiastic teen explaining everything about their meticulously planned-out World of Darkness RPG campaign.
 The main problem is that almost every elements here is borrowed. The film acts like a snapshot of the things the creators were into at the moment: Dark City, Jacob's Ladder, Butterfly Effect, The Frighteners, image comics like Witchblade and The Darkness, and so many other things; Somehow it's not surprising when several characters turn up wrapped in body-hugging vinyl suits, looking like refugees from a porn-level parody of The Matrix.

 It's the image comics influence that looms the most, especially as the film barrels on towards a series of alternatingly cheesy and cornball (but always juvenile) revelations that posit events as a sort of "dark" superhero origin story. Ambitious, for sure, but the budget struggles to contain the... let's call them heady concepts the script has dreamed up. There's one really good scene where Ian's worlds smash into each other, but when the script finally calls for some action it's a series of perfunctory, deeply underwhelming stabbings.

 Stan Winston has a prominent producer's credit and the film proudly touts its animatronics and makeup effects were built in his studios, but I'm sad to say the monsters don't look all that great, and are further undone by bone-headed decisions like making them periodically shake their head wildly in fast forward. That's an effect that worked precisely once, in Jacob's Ladder, and never again. The gore fares a little bit better - there are a lot of goopy, very bloody injuries, but they're all deeply unimaginative - stabs and slashes and the like.

 It's never scary, but that isn't really a problem as the film is going more after a Matrix-style mindfuck tone than actual horror. What does cause problems is a series of silly choices like letting a couple of villains keep their hockey jerseys throughout much of the movie, making it look like the protagonist is running away from high-school bullies.

 Acting is yet another weak point. It's... fine, for the most part. But Vogel, with his baby-faced good looks lacks the charisma to anchor the film, and Murray is soon outmatched when pitted against a script that saddles her with increasingly pretentious monologues. The great Michael Feast does what he can but even he is defeated by the cheese he's asked to dispense and the film's solemn, self-serious tone.

 I admire the ambition on display, but it's ultimately misplaced on a deeply derivative, juvenile edifice of hackwork. Both mildly likeable and fairly cringe-worthy, it's only an hour and a half and the pacing is fairly relentless... so at least it goes down quick.