Movie Review - 'Jake's Corner'

Jake's Corner

Starring Richard Tyson, Colton Rodgers, and Danny Trejo
Directed by Jeff Santo
Rated PG

Low-budget, locally made films are tricky for a number of reasons. These movies don't have a lot of resources at their disposal, and watching them, you do need to remember that. In many cases, just getting a finished product is sometimes a tremendous hurdle to overcome. Without a lot of money and time, and without some of the necessary experience that studios bring to the table dozens of times a year for their own projects, the independent filmmaker - the true independent filmmaker - deserves some recognition for even being in this position.A few years ago, director Jeff Santo made a very good documentary called This Old Cub about his father, Chicago Cubs legend Ron Santo. The elder Santo was a player and is now a broadcaster for the Cubs, and his courageous lifelong battle against diabetes was kept a secret while he was a player, but it has certainly taken its toll on him in the past few decades.I enjoyed This Old Cub a great deal, which is the good news; the bad news, at least for Santo's new film Jake's Corner, is that it can't measure up to that very personal documentary.Things are different this time around for Santo, who is working on a dramatic film rather than a documentary. As such, there's a lot more reliance on the writing than there is in a non-fiction film. And here's where we go back to having limited resources: I'd say I was fine with maybe 65% of the performances (and all of the principals except one), but the screenplay is just not up to snuff. And ultimately, in a movie of this size, that's the one major element that has to shine. Casting will almost always suffer because you don't have every actor in Hollywood at your disposal, and there will be some technical things that aren't very smooth, so your story and dialogue has to be crisp, entertaining, and thoughtful. I just didn't think Jake's Corner gave us enough of that. It's the story of a college football star (a Heisman winner, no less) who turns his back on the NFL to run a biker bar in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. Johnny Dunn (Richard Tyson) was great at running on the field, but he was probably better at running off of it, which is how he wound up here in Jake's Corner without a care in the world. Tragedy strikes his family, though, and Johnny has to become the guardian for his nephew, Spence (Colton Rodgers). It's their story that should be growing deeper and more compelling throughout the movie, but the script seems to want to avoid it, throwing a lot more characters at us than we need, and a lot of scenes between those characters that add color but not any real depth. There's something here, though. Santo can direct drama pretty well, and I thought Richard Tyson was actually quite good. I wish he'd had more to do in the middle of the film. You can tell that the cinematography was a chief concern for the director, and it passes that test. But the script needs work or an extra set of eyes. I would be surprised if this is the last we see of Jeff Santo, though, a filmmaker who appears to be learning valuable lessons each time he comes up to bat. I guess we know where he gets that.