Search - The Grind on DVD

Kind of A Grind to Get Through

Jym Cherry | Wheaton, IL United States | 08/01/2010

(2 out of 5 stars)

"C. Thomas Howell plays a small time hustler named Luke who is always looking for the next score. He owes 24K to the Mexican mafia and he has to pay the debt in three days. Luckily, he has an idea to get the money, a website called [...], and not only is he going to charge the customers to the website he's going to sell their credit card information.

Four women are recruited to live in the house, and their characters are not so much archetypes as stereotypes, and each one has a penchant for stabbing people. As the website starts to make money, the woman start to get killed, and the rest of the characters try to figure out the mystery of who the killer is. But no real suspense is built up one of the characters has to mention it to put it in the viewers mind. The solving of the mystery is anticlimactic, there is no real resolution to the elements put in play all of a sudden the voice over says "I never saw the women again after that night," then Luke and his friends are paying off the Mexican Mafia, and I guess they all live happily ever after.

Howell's acting is fine although he keeps a hang dog expression on his face the whole time, but one thing that bothered me is Howell's character is beat up in the first scene and over the course of the movie he never seems to clean up, over the course of the three days the movie is supposed to take place he never wipes the blood off his forehead. Tim Sizemore and Danny Trejo make cameo appearances, Sizemore as a fence for the credit card numbers, and Trejo as the head of the Mexican Mafia, the characters don't have any more development than that and was probably an easy day of work for the both of them.

The Grind might be all right if you want to blow an hour and half and see some naked women, but the film doesn't draw you into the characters or even give you any feel for them as people. It's a 2.5 star movie."