Hello, moviegoers!

As you may already know, my father cancelled his Amazon Prime subscription. This has given us the chance to dig up movies from a different pile of dung. In this case, we found Beast of Burden among the offerings from Pluto TV.

Welcome to the Beast of Burden review!

To my disappointment, Beast of Burden stars no cute mule. Instead, we get Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter from now on), who has to fly a plane loaded up with drugs from Mexico into the US.

Beast of Burden is one of those "isolationist" movies in which it places a small cast within a small world out of which not much exists, and the plot must be resolved within that world. I am a big fan of these movies because they prove you can produce a decent film with a budget consisting in ten dollar and a box of used chewing gum. Isolationist movies may succeed by being clever, having characters you care about, and bringing suspense to the table.

The problem with Beast of Burden is that he is so retarded he could apply for a disability handout, you could not care less for what happens to the characters, and the only mystery is how Harry Potter managed to obtain a plane with drugs in exchange for his flying broom.

The overwelming most of the movie takes place in the cockpit of the plane Potter must fly across the US border. The plot is revealed through the frequent phone calls he gets and the conversations he sustains with different people.
I suspect the idea was to make people wonder who the people calling in is, but it is very clear by the first 10 minutes that Potter is cooperating with the feds in order to capture a drug cartel, in exchange for the money his wife needs for medical care.

Something this movie gets right, to a disturbingly realistic degree, is that you'll never get your wife happy. For the whole movie you can see Potter trying to play the DEA and the drug lords so she can have the best. Meanwhile she is bitching and crying and complaining. Seriously, past the first 15 minutes I kept thinking that Potter would better let this one die and get another one. Who knows, maybe Hermione is tired of Ron-the-loser and is available again?

Whoever got the job as advisor for the plane-y part of the film got his Pilot license in a cereal box, which by the look of it had been contaminated with high doses of some mind altering drug. The movie is not brimming with action, but the few it has is so unrealisticly executed that it strains suspension of disbelief until it rips and leaves your mind in vegetative state. I don't mean by this that the scenes are over the top (as in an action movie from the 90s), but that they are stupid even within the framework the movie offers to us.

I felt bad after watching this train wrek, because Daniel is an actor good enough to deserve better than this trash of a train wreck. Not that his acting here was good (actually it was as bad as a blowjob with teeth), mind you, but after playing as Igor in that Victor Frankenstein movie, you have to wonder how has he managed to fall this low. Even Guns Akimbo, as silly and stupid as it was, was a better film to star, if just because it didn't pretend to be good and just pretended to be crazy.

Maybe Harry Potter himself is succeeding in what Lord Voldemort could not achieve: destroying The Child who Lived...

/S
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