Amazon Queen – Easy Watch Action Film
Director: Marlin Darrah
Writer: Rick Cullis, Marlin Darrah, Richard Lasser (Screenplay)
Starring: Carly Diamond Stone, Carson Grant, Nick Dreselly Thomas, Massi Furlan, Alfonso DiLuca, Vicky Dawson, Clayton Meek
Plot: A group of tourists joins the Amazon Forest riverboat “Queen” as it ventures upriver, to visit indigenous villages and explore jungle habitats. But a dark cloud of thievery and menace thunders aboard, threatening all with death.
Runtime: 1 Hour 27 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Story: Amazon Queen starts when captains, Jackie Santos (Stone) and Flynn McIntyre (Thomas) looks to take their Amazon Queen with tourist out on the river. They are joined by mother Maggie (Dawson) daughter Leilah (Encarnacion), documentarian Sam Romero (DiLuca) and two bank robbers Machado (Furlan) and Silva (Meek) who are looking for their stolen loot, which crashed on the river.
When the journey isn’t going fast enough, Machado decides to take the boat hostage to rush to the location of their treasure, wanting to learn the truth about his brother.
Thoughts on Amazon Queen
Characters & Performances – Jackie Santos is one of the captains on of the boat, she knows the couple need money to keep the boat afloat, which does have a lot of history in her family. She gets a surprise on the latest trip, where she will look to do the right thing for the tourists when things go wrong. Machado is the criminal who wants to find the money and his brother after a heist gone wrong, he wants to do it quietly, but must take things into his own hands, taking the boat hostage, he is determined to make sure he gets what he wants, willing to do anything to make it happen. When we look deeper at the characters, we do seem to lack anyone that does have the charisma to standout, with most feeling like everyday people, no big hero stepping up, no completely twisted villains, it just feels flatter than anything else. The performances don’t make the characters standout in the way they should for the action film this wants to be.
Story – The story here follows a river cruise that gets taken over by robbers who want to use the boat to find a missing loot that was stolen from them, which crash landed in the middle of the Amazon River. This is a story that could have gone in a different direction, with the film wanting to make sure we meet everyone, instead of letting the action unfold in the story. The idea of traveling to a dangerous location to find a missing treasure does work well for the film, it makes sense they try to do it in a calm way, instead of all guns blazing, but as soon as they take the boat hostage, the tone doesn’t seem to match up, because it is never intense enough with the threat they could be facing.
Themes – Amazon Queen is an action movie that uses the beautiful Amazon River as the backdrop for the adventure to happen, showing us just how much danger, the tourists could be in, once the criminals want to take over. We don’t however get much action, with most being tame for what it could have been, leaving the film feeling a lot flatter than it should have.
Final Thoughts – Amazon Queen is a by the book late night action film, that just lacks the intensity to shine.