Kim Basinger hasn’t had a lot to do on film the last few years so she took on the feminist revenge thriller While She Was Out, serving as not only star but executive producer. Also being an exec was Guillermo del Toro so you begin watching the 86-minute with high expectations that this will rise above the cookie cutter collection of one woman against a gang.
Written and directed by Susan Montford, based on Edward Bryant’s short story, one would also have expected that being a female, her attention to character and story coherence would be stronger than the competition.
In every way, the thriller, available on DVD April 28 from Anchor Bay, disappoints.
Basinger plays Della, a suburban housewife who appears incapable of keeping her home organized, her finances current, or her cell phone charged. On Christmas Eve, just as her abusive husband comes home from work, Della realizes she needs wrapping paper. There’s nowhere else to get the paper than the mall, which of course was mobbed and by then, her things began to go wrong. She couldn’t find a close-by parking, her cell phone ran out of juice, her credit card gets declined and so on. Along the way, she spots a car taking up two spots and in a show of life, leaves a note on the windshield.
When she returns to the car, the driver of the badly parked car and his pals corner her. She finds her voice and her strength, getting physical and shoves the men around until a Security officer arrives. He tries to chase off the random collection of ethnic types until one actually shoots and kills him. With Della a witness, the chase begins to find and kill her before she could identify them as the killers.
Her car crashes, of course, and then it becomes a footrace with Della armed with a wrench. Of course, one by one, she somehow manages to dispatch the gang until it’s just her and leader, played by Lukas Haas. The final third of the film is just them and winds up in every predictable way.
The DVD comes with sparse extras including a lengthy making of documentary with everyone going on about how wonderful the collaborative process was and what a strong story they had to tell. Basinger in particular helped shape Della but in the final product, you have no clue how she went from dysfunctional housewife to I-am-woman-hear-me-roar in just a few hours. Her character arc, the spine of the film, makes no sense.
The rest of the film is also shot on the dark side so following the action isn’t easy. The performances are fine, good even, but the story is riddled with plot and logic holes so it’s tough to take.
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