Incoming Film Analysis

Abstract

A few men known to be a terrorist group called Wolfpack attacks targets through several Western countries, and a few years later, all six of the killers are being held prisoner on an orbiting space station. They are all unaware of who else is aboard the station and spend part of their day undergoing extreme situations interrogation by a man named Kingsley (Lukas Loughran). A shuttle arrives bringing the pilot Bridges (Aaron McCusker), a doctor named Stone (Michelle Lehane), and a CIA agent called Reiser (Adkins). A bad call, by an emotionally driven instead of using common sense, results in the terrorists escaping their cells and setting the entire station on a terrible path, on a collision course for Moscow.

Incoming broke so many of the simplest rules of film, but such among them is misusing Adkins. It's an ensemble film making him just one of many, but rather than make the most of his time onscreen his action beats are kept to a minimum. Then Adkins is forced to fight down to the level of his co-stars meaning his swings are slower and higher then you find in his better films. Making the action of the film less convincing and kind of lame. On the plus side, he does get to dispatch a few baddies with a knife, and the film isn't shy about its rapid-fire stabbings.

Despite its setting, this is another by the numbers action film. Nothing is done with the possibilities of zero gravity, decompression, or deception. . It does provide a reason why there are no firearms, which again I felt was pretty lame, and everyone has to fight hand to hand though. Even the threat of crashing into Moscow is so underwhelming it could have been any generic race against time type of threat instead of the unrealistic and poor editing deception that was displayed. I'm also wondering how many people outside of Russia would really care if Moscow was vaporized. I don't believe Putin would agree or like this film much

The fact that distributor XLrator Media saw fit to hide the film's actual plot, early pre-production art highlighted the outer space setting, should have been a hint that INCOMING had some major issues. Indeed the plot is so full of holes it's impossible to take seriously. For example, apart from the prisoners, there's one other person on the station full time, their interrogator. No security, no medical personnel, no maintenance people, nobody. That pretty well kills the film's credibility right from the start.

If all you're watching for is the fights then this will keep you happy because there are many fight scenes. And to be fair the audience is tuning in for it. But if you demand a working plot to go with the action, you may want to look elsewhere, it's not like Adkins doesn't have a large body of work to choose from.

Basically as with so many VOD movies the movie is primarily let down by its budget but there are some interesting ideas and as usual Scott is the best thing about the entire film. . You aren't quite sure if his character is a good guy or bad guy as his methods are rather brutal. The movie throws us for a loop with him for a bit before we can distinguish his real role. He literally takes no prisoners and any time he faces of against any of the escaped cons he makes sure they don't leave alive.

The first half is rather dull with little in the way of action but the final half hour has some pretty decent fight scenes including a knife fight which is arguably the action highlight. Much more could have been produced and bought to life with better digital editing and sound design. I would have to rate this movie a grade of C minus when it comes to the editing and sound design.

I hated the character of Stone (Michelle Lehane) who is responsible for the prisoners escaping and it bothered me that she survived the movie as she was totally unsympathetic. This right here can point its finger at the director for not seeing his full vision through. I blame cutting corners and not budgeting for the film correctly. Better editing and plot construction was needed in this film. But, I thought the villains were relatively interesting and you could almost see their angle as they had been tortured and abused by their captors.

Conclusion

The film was very grey looking too so it was just not so easy to look at with little to keep your eyes interested in what was going on. The plot is almost everything to a script to help bring the storyline into clear perspective and they failed horribly with this. Some say the grey was deliberate to demonstrate the shades of grey in the characters which was certainly the case. I say it was foul error or someone trying to find an identity and dibbled with a new editing technique and it didn't go so good. . I also struggled to make out what people were saying a lot of the time, once again point the finger at the editing department.

Overall, Incoming didn't really look great from the trailers so it's not much of a disappointment that the film has come and gone without a trace. This film may be amongst the lost tapes on Netflix, Burris's deep in the search engine of grey independent films. Even as a die hard Scott Adkins fan there isn't much to recommend aside from a few fights towards the end.

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