The first fifteen minutes of the new thriller Chop Chop are very promising. A freaky home invasion is the trigger for some alarming acts of violence, which leave a young couple in a chilling predicament; a crisis which pulls them back into the darkness of their earlier lives. It’s an intriguing introduction for what could be an unpredictable story. Sadly, the film’s narrative then moves through a series of self-consciously ‘bizarre’ turns which steer the drama into a creative cul-de-sac.
Liv (Atala Arce) and Chuck (Jake Taylor) are enduring a dull domestic evening in, when their timeout is interrupted by the arrival of a creepy and insistent pizza delivery guy. In what turns out to be the film’s most effective sequence, Liv discovers him sitting on their couch watching TV – and mayhem ensues. The police meanwhile are tracking a serial killer and have the couple’s block under surveillance. When a detective stops their car, the pair make a fateful choice.
The brief road trip that follows pays more than a little homage to the Kill Bill era of Tarantino’s work. Oddball characters appear, there’s some retro-style soft-core torture porn, and some edgy sound design. But none of it amounts to anything particularly compelling. Arce and Taylor deliver such emotionally closed-down performances that there’s little insight into their characters’ nature or motivations. That sense of disconnection is reinforced by director Rony Patel’s enthusiasm for injecting long pauses into almost every conversation. There’s plenty of ambition in evidence in what is Patel’s feature debut, but the weirdness has a stilted quality. This feels like a story with its heart chopped out.
