THE PARAGON - Mark Reviews Movies

The Paragon, Doppelgänger Releasing

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2024

Here's a scrappy little movie about legitimate psychic phenomena, alternate dimensions, and an angry guy learning that the world doesn't revolve around him and his problems. The Paragon was clearly made on a limited budget by writer/director Michael Duignan, who makes his feature debut with it, and in that respect, it possesses a certain charm. You don't need elaborate visual effects, after all, when the "epic battle" portrayed in a key flashback basically comes down to two men staring at each other with intense focus.

It's less convincing from a story perspective, since so much of this comes down to a complex or, if it dare be redundantly said about a movie that involves the ability to create different universes, convoluted string of rules and shifts in reality. Duignan's screenplay has an intriguing, character-focused setup here, even if and maybe because it's tough to like the guy at the center of that idea. Bringing all sorts of mythology and alternate realities and magical whatsits and/or rituals into the mix is certainly to be expected, but all of that eventually takes over what's a pretty grounded story—relatively speaking, of course.

That tale involves Dutch (Benedict Wall), a former tennis pro and independent entrepreneur whose career and whole life have been turned upside-down after he was hit by a car about a year before the start of the story. The collision broke his leg to such an extent that he now requires a cane to walk and presumably will for the rest of his life. That's tennis gone for him, as well as his training business, which taught players how to get into an opponent's head by bringing up any dirt on the other player that one could find.

Just from that, we know Dutch has issues that go beyond the physical limitation that wasn't his fault. He's to blame for a lot, though, which his wife Emily (Jessica Grace Smith) has tried to make clear to him for a while now. She knows enough to have written a lengthy, bullet-pointed list of his flaws and foibles, prompted by the fact that she wants Dutch to know she has been having an affair with a co-worker and thinks their marriage is finished.

Angry—which was definitely on the list—and now without anything he once had, Dutch becomes set on getting revenge on the person who struck him with a car and drove away while he was medically dead for six minutes. The barriers are many, mostly that nobody got the license plate of the car and that it was of a make and model that's quite common around town. That doesn't stop him from wandering around, asking people if they've seen such a car, and hitting that obvious dead end.

The plot really starts, though, when Dutch spots a flyer promising psychic training. After taking a contact slip, a nearby payphone rings immediately. On the other end of the line is Lyra (Florence Noble), who doubts Dutch's psychic potential until she learns he was technically dead. That makes him a perfect candidate for her teaching.

The training process is pretty amusing, since Dutch is regularly distracted by his thoughts, his discontent, and his certainty that life has it out for him. Trying to get him to clear his mind, Lyra insists that Dutch shouldn't listen to his thoughts but to not listen to the blank space between them.

Duignan makes a point of not taking any of this too seriously for a while, which has the dual benefit of cutting through the silliness of the premise and the self-absorbed nature of this protagonist. Once Dutch does find the hit-and-run driver after honing his senses and with Lyra's help, things take an unexpected turn that forces him to have a broader perspective about other people, consequences, and the kind of person he actually is.

That point might be where Duignan's screenplay loses its way. That's the climax of Dutch's story, but we're also deep into an entirely different line of thinking about what matters in the narrative.

The other part of it revolves around the eponymous item, a mystical gem that contains the power to do pretty much anything in the right—or wrong—hands. Lyra wants to find it before her power-hungry brother Haxan (Jonny Brugh), whose goals with the MacGuffin of unlimited power seem fairly limited once the plot fixes upon that course. Duignan may find a way to allow his budget to match his ambitions on a technical level. The story here, however, feels restricted by the apparent need for a couple of showdowns and a couple twists of reality.

They don't make much sense. That's less of a problem, though, than how the mechanics of the plotting overshadow Dutch, while also repeating what he has already gone through at a hurried pace. The Paragon deserves some credit for its ability to make an on-the-cheap production do what it needs to, its off-beat sense of humor, and the way it finds a human story within the oddities of this narrative. The story's gradual and ultimate turn toward taking itself too seriously, though, undermine too much of those qualities.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products