Your Move

Having conquered the music world by being the drummer in one of the biggest bands of the 1980s and made his mark as an actor with credits in Hellboy 2 and Blade 2, Luke Goss tries his hand behind the camera in his directorial debut Your Move.

Not content with directing, Goss leads the cast too as David, a successful New York businessman who witnesses his wife and child’s brutal kidnapping while on a video call to them in Mexico. Unable to rely on the country’s law enforcement, he embarks on a journey to find his family and avenge the violence that befell them.

From looking at the DVD cover, which features multiple burning buildings, a helicopter hovering ominously overhead and a gun-toting Goss standing tall, you would be forgiven for thinking this is a typical action shoot-em-up forever destined to be compared to the likes of Taken. I was guilty of thinking this too; within five minutes of it starting, I (rather arrogantly) predicted what I thought I was about to see. Oh, how I was mistaken.

Containing approximately zero high-speed car chases or explosive set pieces, Your Move is a surprisingly subdued affair. Goss shows an incredible amount of restraint when it could have been so easy to push out yet another mindless display of macho meat-headedness, and in the process, reveals a level of self-discipline so sorely missing from modern-day thrillers.

Yes, the story of a vengeful man hellbent on avenging violence against a loved one has been committed to celluloid more times than I dare to mention, but Your Move is a rare example of having the main character where you genuinely believe he doesn’t enjoy harming others and is doing so out of pure desperation. He doesn’t have a particular set of skills or never trained in the mountains by an elite group of warriors, David is simply a relatable everyman who is pushed to the brink by an unthinkable crime.

Goss is engrossing as the lead, striking the perfect balance between tough guy when necessary and an average joe struggling with an inner turmoil of having to stoop to the violent levels of the men who took his wife and child to get them back.Robert Davi adds to the star power as the snappily dressed but grizzled detective Romero who follows a more traditional path to solve the case, while Patricia De Leon and Laura Martin as the snatched wife and daughter Isabel & Savannah respectively are largely kept off until the third act but perform admirably enough to make us care about their predicament. Alain Mora brings the bad guy in the form of Gabriel, a slimy and ruthless criminal whose reasons for kidnapping David’s wife are more than coincidental.

There are a few issues with colour grading in parts; indoor shots (particularly nighttime sequences) can occasionally be quite hard to fully make out due to underexposure and sometimes the grading gets a little too garish, but when scenes are happening outside in Mexico the scorching orange glow really adds to the atmosphere.

But that’s just nitpicking in what is a pleasantly surprising picture. Your Move is one of the most promising directorial debuts in years; It is an action movie with a heart, as opposed to one which is more concerned with putting bullets in them. Goss proves he is a creative chameleon who seems to be slowly but surely engineering total domination of every form of entertainment, and I for one shall be keeping a keen eye out for his future projects.

Your Move is out now on DVD through Thunderbird Releasing.