LOADED -- DVD review by porfle

Sometimes it's fun to watch a movie about someone with a perfect life who stumbles into something that causes his entire existence to take a screaming nosedive straight into the crapper.

The guy with the perfect life in LOADED (2008) is Tristan Price (Jesse Metcalfe, JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE), a law student who still lives with his rich parents. On the night of his 25th birthday, Tristan is feeling stifled by his highly regimented homelife and wants to go out on the town with his brother Hayden (Chace Crawford) and their buddies for a wild night of excessive drinking, lap dances, and general tomfoolery. But when he hooks up with the curiously friendly Sebastian (scripter Corey Large, TOXIC) during a party at the badass coke dealer's beachfront mansion, he gets sucked into a maelstrom of drugs, guns, violence, and betrayal. Bad for him--fun for us!

As the comparative freedom of Sebastian's lifestyle becomes increasingly intoxicating to Tristan, so does a dark beauty named April (Nathalie Kelley) who appears to reciprocate his interest while concealing her true motives. Tristan manages to forget that he already has a sweetheart, Brooke (Monica Keena, LEFT IN DARKNESS), or a big law school exam that he's no longer too keen on studying for. As he gets more and more strung out on coke, alcohol, and other illicit substances, his new pal Sebastian begins to include him in his shady and dangerous dope dealings. Before he knows it, Tristan is involved in a brutal killing for which he is suddenly the main suspect. Has the once-promising young college boy hit rock bottom? Not yet--there's still quite a ways to go, and watching him get there is rather entertaining.

Corey Large's cracking script is given just the right treatment by director Alan Pao, who knows when to crank up the zippity-doo-dah visuals (speed-up/slow-down effects, Shaky-Cam, self-consciously arty angles, etc.) and when to reign them in, all in service to the story. Once the tension begins to build it stays taut until the very end, with occasional bursts of violence that are well-staged and unsettling, and enough twists to keep the viewer off-balance much of the time.

Jesse Metcalfe is a good choice to play the callow rich kid who's in way over his head, while Corey Large makes an ideal bad guy who can be friendly and engaging one minute, ruthless and frightening the next. Johnny Messner and Jimmy Jean-Louis are equally effective as Sebastian's scarily sadistic goons Javon and Antonio. On the female side, Monica Keena is all winsome innocence as Brooke, while Nathalie Kelley convincingly portrays her seductive counterpart. Familiar faces such as Erin Gray ("Buck Rogers in the 25th Century"), Parker Stevenson ("The Hardy Boys"), and former teen heartthrob Nicole Eggert add nostalgic appeal for those of us who still remember the 70s and 80s. And to top it off, my main man Vinnie Jones (X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, THE CONDEMNED) shows up in a couple of scenes as Sebastian's surly competitor, Mr. Black. Yay, Vinnie!

The DVD is 2:35:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes featurette, a brief gag reel, a trailer for this and other Allumination Filmworks releases, and Spanish subtitles.

Before his extended nightmare is over, Tristan ends up punching out his brother Hayden, disrupting a fancy dinner party in the family home by shooting a member of said family, getting caught doing the nasty with April by an unpleasantly-surprised Brooke, and finding himself in the middle of a bullet-riddled shootout between Sebastian's and Mr. Black's crews--with a final showdown between himself and Sebastian yet to come. LOADED may not be a killer gangster epic of the first order, but it's well-done and consistently engaging right up to the suspenseful conclusion, and well worth checking out.