'Nightshooters' Review: A B-Movie Romp | Toronto After Dark 2021

As a film festival, Toronto After Dark has always struck me as a festival devoted to the Midnight Madness vibe of TIFF. When in-person festivals were all the rage, films coming from TAD would elicit whooping and hollering as intended. And as festivals continue to run virtually, these are the types of the films that lose out to the in-person experience. Case in point: Nightshooters.

The British crime-action-comedy is self-aware, satirical, and full of some pretty extraordinary fight sequences. In Nightshooters, an independent film crew is filming some pick up shots in a building scheduled for demolition. As the crew work throughout the night, they happen to witness a gang hit in the adjacent building. After the film crew is discovered, they become enemy #1.

The use of a film crew working permit-less and guerilla style is a great premise and director and writer Marc Price uses the set-up really well. From the stunt workers being able to actually fight to the stunt coordinators and production staff having dummy weapons (albeit still capable of eliciting actual harm), Nightshooters is as much an ode to often-overlooked stunt teams as it is to the gangster genre.

The fight choreography of Nightshooters is truly top-notch. Jean-Paul Ly plays Donnie, the film crew's stuntman, and in real-life has an impressive CV as a stunt performer. Ly carries the film delivering some of the coolest hits and performs impressive sequences with great precision.

Nightshooters isn't simply kicks and punches, it also offers the dry British humour those of us outside the Isles have almost come to expect. Never taking itself too seriously, Price's film does it exactly what it says on the tin: it's a B-level romp that is loads of fun and gushes of both blood and humour.

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival runs online from October 13 to 17.