In Skip Woods’s first (and, oddly enough, last) directorial effort, this politically incorrect bloodbath of a male-centric buddy flick drug heist movie is clearly riding the tidal wave Pulp Fiction generated in the mid-1990s and that Boogie Nights’ stylized sex and violence built on and transcended. Thursday, released to zero acclaim and almost no box office, undoubtedly a product of its age (for better and for worse), is a blatant and not wholly unsuccessful attempt to outdo Tarantino himself, mixing ironic Gen X black humor with flashy gunplay and over-the-top blood-soaked visuals that somehow seem far more realistic than Tarantino’s comic-book violence. The film’s ostensibly central character is Casey (played by Boogie Nights’ Thomas Jane) who has given up his partnership in Los Angeles drug crime with his buddy Nick (Aaron Eckhardt) for a career as an architect and a quiet henpecked husband’s life in a Houston suburb along with his domineering wife, Christine (Paula Marshall).
We meet Nick and his motley gang of drug traffickers—the trigger-happy Dallas (former supermodel Paulina Porizkova) and the sadistic Billy (1990s indie stalwart James LeGros) in an unforgettably Tarantino-esque first scene in a convenience store involving a casual double murder of a cashier and a cop. Then Nick plays what seems to be an innocent visit to Casey’s house: but as we soon learn, there’s nothing random about this reunion. Nick leaves millions of dollars’ worth of heroin in a suitcase on Casey’s kitchen table—a gesture that sets in motion a series of unwelcome visits from a succession of killers looking for the stolen smack, including a bent cop (Mickey Rourke), hit-girl Dallas, and a Jamaican drug lord’s assassin dressed as a Rastafarian pizza delivery man. All attempt, in their own wildly improbable ways, to coerce Casey at gunpoint into handing over the stolen contraband, none of which are successful. Besides Jane’s all-too-believable performance as the drug-smuggler-turned-architect Casey, the 1980s most ubiquitous swimsuit model, Porizkova, is unforgettable as the sexually uninhibited killer Dallas. It’s a movie that probably should have gotten more recognition in its day, but it was clearly too naughty, even for the late 1990s. Recommended.