Gabriel - This movie was so bad I have to write about it.
 

Here is the IMDB link since pretty much no one has references or reviews of the movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0857376/

Saw this a couple of weeks ago after losing a coin toss with friends. Couldn't find a rottentomatos page on the movie so we couldn't tell beforehand whether it was good or not. My only guide was a review I saw on The Movie Show which is a TV show here in Australia. On reviewer gave it 1.5 stars, the other gave it 3.5, saying it was a great accomplishment for Australian film makers etc. The negative review was because he didn't like the style of the movie.

Anyway, the movie is about angels that fall from heaven to purgatory to fight demons who have so far been stealing the souls of other fallen angels.
It's an interesting enough concept which has recently been covered pretty well with movies like Constantine, although this movie has a more similar feel to The Matrix and Dark City.
Sounds pretty good so far, but it all falls apart after the opening credits. After watching an interestingly filmed opening title, the first scene had me wondering what was up with the artistic direction on the movie. About 50% of the scenes in the movie seem to have been passed through a softening filter, with almost no detail in the shots. The only thing I can accurately descibe it as is watching a camcorder copied movie in the cinemas.
I thought at first that maybe the artistic talent on the film were presenting different locations/characters with different styles, like Traffic, but I couldn't find a link between the style and the type of scene. Sometimes the effect would come and go between different shots in the same scene, and once or twice it faded from clean and detailed to soft and rubbish within the same shot. My brain couldn't work out how to focus my eyes during the movie and I got a headache that lasted into the next day.

Acting for the most part is wooden from some actors, and way too moody from some others. The Australian accents kept creeping out from under the fake American accents and that just added to taking me out of the experience.

The story has a lot of potential but gets drowned by the lack of character development, terrible dialogue and bad pacing of script. There were a lot of moments towards the end that could have been taken out of context as having gay undertones. A lot of talk about brotherly love while the first 95% of the movie contains macho ass kicking and flying bullets.
There weren't really too many redeeming features about this movie apart from it maing me want to The Crow, Dark City and Constantine again.

IMDB does not list anything other than an Australian release date for this movie so anyone not Australia/New Zealand may not get to see it for a while. If you lose a coin toss over watching this movie like I did though, you may want to fake some sort of an illness to get out of it. You have been warned.

Rating: 1/5