“You can’t kill the idea,” a brutal contract killer informs his partner in “The Chameleon.” But this low-budget feature by Michigan filmmaker and actor Phil Wurtzel proves the opposite all too well.
The movie is built around the evocative charisma of John Cassavetes’ regular Seymour Cassel. Unfortunately, the material Wurtzel has constructed around Cassell is strictly standard issue. Cassel is a reformed Chicago mobster anonymously living in a quiet Michigan community who is the subject of a well-coordinated assassination plot. The story is frozen on two other fronts, the personal and career disappointments of his journalist granddaughter Amy (Adrianne Duncan). In turn, the dominant story becomes the division between her boyfriend, John (Wurtzel), a sheriff’s deputy, and the man’s father, the sheriff (Tom Dahlgren), who is concealing his own traumatic past. The movie is imprisoned by a false morality bound by vengeance and retribution, though it offers little in the way of characterization, depth of feeling or personality of a story that is numbingly familiar.
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“The Chameleon” ((star)(star)) opens Friday at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave. Running time: 1:27. No MPAA rating (language, violence, adult situations).
