My Review of "Sleight"

Sleight came into the Netflix library very quietly. I don't think a lot of people have heard of this movie and rightly so. When it came out in 2016, there was no media coverage of this movie. It's a low budget movie so expect to see made for TV movie quality. This doesn't mean it's going to be a bad movie though. Oddly enough the WWE, yes the wrestling organization, is one of the companies that helped produce the film. I already know this is going to be top notch quality when I saw their logo.

You'd be surprised about what this little movie can do. It starts with the main character Bo, played by Jacob Latimore, he's a street magician trying to make money to support himself and his little sister. Their parents are out of the picture and he's stuck raising a child on his own.

We see that he had great potential when he was younger. He seems to be a really smart kid and he's a very good performer. Right at the beginning of the movie we notice that he's gone so far as to implant something into his arm in order to enhance his magic tricks.

While he's street performing one day, a girl by the name of Holly, played by Seychelle Gabriel, drops him her number. They immediately click and that's when the drama starts happening.

You see little did they know, Bo has been selling drugs late at night to help make ends meet. His drug boss Angelo, played by Dulé Hill, is getting competition on the streets. As a drug boss he has to make an example of this person impeding on his business. Unfortunately for Bo, this is the side of Angelo he's never seen before. Before long Bo realizes that he's in too deep in the drug business to get out. Angelo will never let him off.

There was some confusion to me as to why this movie was called Sleight in the beginning of the movie. Obviously it had to do with Bo's ability to do magic tricks but they didn't really play with his magic until the very end of the movie. The street magic was kind of a side thing that they kind of brushed aside as if it wasn't a big deal. It's supposed to be more central to the story. Again, yes it is but throughout the movie you don't really get a sense that it's a big deal.

While watching the movie I kept wondering how come he kept selling drugs when his ability to do magic would allow him to steal from so many people. I guess in Bo's eyes selling drugs is a victim-less crime. If he was stealing the audience would have a different opinion of him. I think it may have been justified seeing as his situation was so bad. It's too bad they only really used his abilities when things started really heating up for him.

There are some really intense parts in this movie. Even though they didn't show certain scenes to keep it PG. I would say there are some cringe moments when Bo's forced to do certain things. I have to commend the filmmakers for the way that they executed some of those scenes. It was done in a way where we understood what was happening and didn't really need to see the extreme violence.

For the most part I thought the acting was actually pretty good. I say this because the actors were pivotal to getting us cringe and feel for them in certain scenes even though the visceral actions weren't directly seen. There were some continuity issues in the movie though.

There would be situations where one of the characters either gets bruises or burns etc and then in the next scene the abrasions disappeared. That kind of took me out of the movie a lot. Some of these injuries seemed really serious. It was weird because these injuries would disappear in a matter of minutes in another scene. How is the audience going to react when you made the injuries a big part of the story? Really weird stuff that I guess I can chalk up to low budget issues.

For what this movie was, I think they did a pretty good job. I know that it takes a lot of work and effort to make movies like this. I hope that it's just a platform for everyone involved to move forward.

Overall, I had an alright time watching this movie. There were a few things that really irked me in this movie but I just blame it on the low budget that they were forced to work under. It was a well made movie for what they were given. I have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. Unfortunately I would only recommend this movie to people that are into amateur films. I don't know if I would watch it again.