Review: ‘Montana’ a derivative, soulless revenge crime drama

At the heart of “Montana,” an otherwise soulless revenge crime drama, there’s the odd but tender bond between an orphaned 14-year-old East London street rat (newcomer McKell David) and a one-legged, former assassin from Serbia (Danish actor Lars Mikkelsen), each demanding payback from a ruthless crime lord (Darrell D’Silva).

Unfortunately, in the hands of music video director Mo Ali, that curious storyline gets squashed under an overly flashy, hyper-violent filmmaking style that favors played-out tough-guy posturing and self-conscious set-ups over character and plot development — both lacking in Jeremy Sheldon’s derivative script.

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There’s nothing here that the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie or Luc Besson hasn’t done before — and more skillfully. That would go double for a steam-bath fight sequence executed with far less ingenuity than the one with Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises.”

Look closely and even that symbolic mentor-student, parent-child relationship between Mikkelsen’s Dimitrije and McKell’s titular Montana (an allusion to Al Pacino’s Tony Montana character in “Scarface”) is essentially a riff on the Jean Reno-Natalie Portman association in Besson’s “The Professional.”

Although the lead performances, including a turn by Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark on “Game of Thrones”) as a no-nonsense police chief, are uniformly solid, the hollow “Montana” has trouble unloading all those stolen parts.

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“Montana”

MPAA rating: None.

Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

Playing: Arena Cinema, Hollywood. Also on VOD.