STONE COLD FOX Review
- stewworldorder
- Jan 15
- 4 min read
It's wild to me that K-Pop Demon Hunters is still in Netflix's Top Ten movies daily all of these months later (as of this writing).
No one saw that flick coming, man. What a phenomenon.
Anyway, I still check every few days to see what is worth watching on the streaming giant, and Rumi, Mira, and Zoey are assuredly still on the list staring back at me. Maybe they are waiting for me to watch it again; who knows? But today I found something else that caught me eye.
Stone Cold Fox is the new movie starring Kiernan Shipka, Krysten Ritter, Kiefer Sutherland, Jamie Chung, and Karen Fukuhara, and it clocks in at some eighty minutes. With that combination of brevity and talent signed on, I knew I had to give it a try. It takes place in the mid-1980's, though everything about the aesthetic to me screams 1970's. The color palette and what folks were wearing... it just seemed from a slightly older decade. So when the flick started referencing other pictures like Commando, I was a little shocked.
The story is of a young runaway, Fox, who takes up with a drug-dealing queenpin named Goldie when the former has nowhere else to turn. Fox has reluctantly left her beloved sister Spooky behind with an abusive and drug-addicted mother, but she always intended to return someday. Unfortunately, she got caught up in her new lover's lifestyle and everything else fell by the wayside.
When Fox sees Spooky at one of Goldie's parties, her priorities shift back into focus, however, and she decides to see about her sister once again. This puts her at odds with Goldie, and when Fox inadvertently steals a huge cache of cocaine, things get even more dire for her.
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ I remain a fan of Kiernan Shipka, who can basically do no wrong from what I have seen so far. I'd like to see her in more big budget pictures than what she accepts / is offered, but either way, she is talented as hell and lifts up every production in which she is involved. She is believable here, has great facial / reactionary acting, and has a ton of charm. In a picture with a surprisingly stacked cast, she still shines the most.
I've noted this about her in just about every article I've written reviewing movies she has been in. It makes me wish I had watched the Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina show when it was airing, but, not being a big TV show kind of guy, I missed that entirely. My loss, I suppose! But I'll be sure to catch everything she does going forward.
+ Stone Cold Fox has a decently straight-ahead storyline that has a twist in the late third act (that totally works with what you've seen before when I started thinking about it, and it really isn't out of nowhere). But it is mostly a pretty basic tale. It keeps to its short runtime and tells the story it has to tell.
This almost sounds like a backhanded compliment, but not every movie needs to be twisty and turny. Sometimes you need a straight-forward story arc with maybe just one surprise detail. I find a lot of films nowadays get caught up in trying to do too much, and they get lost in their own weeds at a certain point. That's luckily not a problem with Stone Cold Fox.
- It's a delightfully short movie that doesn't overextend its runtime, sure, but it also
relies on a lot of plot contrivances and shortcuts to get where it is going at under 90 minutes. Fox's hooking up with Frankie and Dylan is straight filmmaking kismet, and their training of her to be a fighter (in a day! Actually, in a few hours!) is pretty silly. And Frankie's character trait is strange.
Frankie has Vietnam War flashbacks, you see, and while she is a capable enough combatant just based on her training, when she kicks into her mental state, she goes apeshit and starts bodying folks. It allows her to take down two minions who are, quite literally, way out of her weight class. This is all fine, I guess, but it's mightily convenient that the one person that Fox [literally] runs into is the one who can help her fend off her foes.
- Krysten Ritter feels like she is kind of just sleepwalking through this role. She doesn't really contribute much, and it's hard to really pinpoint a characterization beat for her. She's just... "the bad guy". She's not written with any nuance, so I get that she didn't have any help there, but she didn't lift the material up, either.
I've typically always been a fan of Ritter's, so I'm not sure what isn't jiving for me here. She usually has a flavor about her acting that makes her stand out, but she has none of that here. There's no acerbic attitude like she had in Jessica Jones or buoyant personality like she had in Breaking Bad. She's kind of just... present throughout the proceedings. I wish she had been written with more about her.
Stone Cold Fox is a movie that really left me conflicted. I didn't NOT enjoy any particular stretch of it, but I also had to admit it was a relatively weak movie aside from Kiernan Shipka's work. Even Kiefer Sutherland is just kind of there as the villainous police officer on the take, though he is allowed to express more personality than Ritter. Especially at its runtime, Stone Cold Fox is inoffensive, but I think I wanted to like it more than I actually did.