The Light Touch

We’ve got a really bad one here today, folks. The Light Touch might have the visuals of a travel commercial, but it has a script that isn’t even good enough to compare to softcore porn.

The Light Touch focuses on Becky, a pickpocket and kleptomaniac. Many of the events of the film are told via Becky relating them to her therapist. Her therapist is also her mother. Becky sees a girl named Miranda and falls instantly in love. She chases after Miranda. While Miranda spurns her early efforts, she eventually decides that Becky’s stalking is sexy and they fall in love. But uh-oh! Becky’s also stolen from a man named Wesley. And Wesley’s a member of Scotland Yard. He becomes obsessed with bringing Becky down.

I watched The Light Touch based on a line in its plot summary. The line is as follows: “Sexy puckish pickpocket Becky, a Bugs Bunny of a girl, is teasing a wallet out of a purse on a crowded Athens metro.” What the fuck does that mean?! How can you be a “Bugs Bunny of a girl?” Is Becky an anarchist who really likes carrots? I was baffled and fascinated by this line. As it turns out, the Bugs Bunny reference does come into play. There is exactly one scene where Becky evades and teases Wesley in a manner reminiscent of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. As you can imagine, such animated hijinks translate poorly into a live action indie film. This is one of numerous poor and baffling choices the movie makes.

The Light Touch has one of the worst screenplays I’ve seen for a WLW film. It’s so bad. The acting is also bad, but I’m willing to lay more blame at the feet of writer/director Robert MacLean. Meryl Streep couldn’t give you a believable line read with most of this dialogue. The story in The Light Touch is flimsy at best and full of holes at worst. But mostly, it’s down to the dialogue. Sadly, this isn’t even one of the movies where the dialogue is so bad I wonder if MacLean has ever met a human person. No, he definitely has. His shit isn’t weird enough for me to question otherwise. But he has absolutely no idea and seemingly not much interest in making believable or good dialogue.

I am suspicious of MacLean’s motives making this movie. The Light Touch is a film that told me more about the director than any of the characters. Namely, Robert MacLean is a breast guy. I hate that I know that! The Light Touch is not even close to delving into softcore territory. It’s a PG-13. But that actually makes it worse. The script is really reminiscent of softcore features. Except those features get to cut away to some sex. And subsequently, their thin story lines actually amount to something. The Light Touch doesn’t. So the flimsy premises and shit character work just sort of keeps going. But don’t worry, MacLean can still angle the camera in a way that makes you certain that his lead actresses are in possession of breasts.

The one minor positive is that The Light Touch has a level of polish to its visuals. Sort of. Every scene is incredibly well-lit and there’s some sort of gentle diffusion filter. This is where the comparisons to a travel commercial come in. So, it’s nice that I don’t have to complain about how this low budget movie is bad to look at like usual. But I still can’t say the lighting or cinematography is good. All of the scenes are lit the exact same. So, any chance for “mood lighting” is completely absent. And aspects like blocking and camera angles aren’t good either. Basically, this production purchased one powerful floodlight and some diffusion lenses and called it a day. The MVP on this production is the lighting rig itself. That’s not a good thing.

Overall, The Light Touch is particularly well-lit garbage. This is a really, really bad movie. I’m completely unable to express in a review exactly how bad the script is for this movie. It’s truly awful. It was also probably a mistake to invoke Bugs Bunny in the summary. I’m on an endless mission to watch every single WLW movie. But even with that in mind, I still don’t know why I watched The Light Touch when I could’ve just watched some old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Overall rating: 1.9/10

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