I’ll start by saying that it’s honestly a miracle when any movie is made, ever–especially one with a low budget. The Pinch was reportedly made with under $100k which is impressive for any feature film. However (and this is a big however), a low budget isn’t an excuse for a significantly amateurish quality with easily avoidable mistakes. And as we all know, absolutely nothing can save a poor script, which is the foundation upon what a film is built from.

The Pinch follows Rob, a low-level mobster who is nearly rubbed out by Kain, his intense British boss, so he decides to take the bonus he was promised by force. He then kidnaps the boss and demands a hefty ransom. Clearly this premise is not bad, but it’s also not strong or original enough to stand our amongst others in the genre, especially those in the indie filmmaking scene.

One of the film’s taglines on IMDB is “Goodfellas meets Misery.” And as such, it sometimes thinks it’s a little too clever for its own good; all the “snappy” one-liners and action-movie clapbacks are delivered like old jokes that everyone already knows the punchline to. Random narration sometimes comes out of nowhere with little to no success in furthering the plot, and the script has on-the-nose writing that leads to porn-acting quality, despite its lead actors hailing from films like J. Edgar, The Matrix trilogy, and even Deadpool.  I would go into more detail on my issues with the stilted dialogue but it was too often muffled by mids-heavy 80s action music from KillerTracks.

Relationships between characters are so comedically inconsistent that it distances us from any form of empathy towards them. They break up/make up with each other faster than the characters in The Room–which, by the way, I am unsure whether or not they took inspiration from given a scene where Rob’s benchwarmer girlfriend wakes up and smells a rose placed on the pillow next to her as her betrothed gets dressed.

I will give credit to one remotely interesting scene where Rob tortures Kain with a power drill to the foot, with a cutaway shot to an iPhone timer counting down Kain’s five minutes of torture. Unfortunately, ours lasts another 30.

As I wracked my brain trying to figure out why this film was called The Pinch, I could only come to the conclusion that it’s because we have no choice but to do so to ourselves to stay awake for 80 minutes. Obviously, everything I’ve said is just one person’s opinion; on the other hand, the two user reviews on the film’s IMDB page are from two of the actors themselves. ‘Nuff said.