Skip to content
Paydirt is an exercise which feels more interesting in some of the casting than the film as a whole. On/off Bros member Luke Goss‘ biggest film role (outside of Bros: After The Screaming Stops) is easily 2002’s Blade II, opposite Wesley Snipes. Over time, he’s tried to carve out a career as a big action hero, but almost everything has gone straight to DVD.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to Val Kilmer? After the brilliant Top Secret! and his iconic Iceman in Top Gun (with the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick now moved to July 2021), he drew praise for his role as Doc Holliday in 1993’s Tombstone, but for me, his showed he can deliver the goods – and then some – as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, in 1991. I could watch that all day long. However, while Batman Forever has its moments, I would say The Saint doesn’t really have any, and that’s the point where things went off the rails.
Can both of them deliver, here?
After a marijuana bust, overseen by Sheriff Tucker (Kilmer), Damien Brooks (Goss) is sent to jail for five years, then instantly does the thing that no criminal would do – goes back to his old town where he’s immediately spotted by Tucker, who just now happens to be working on his own volition. He looked like he’d been beaten up, but his plastic surgery was not the greatest. However, if you wondered what happened to his voice over time, he suffered a two-year battle with throat cancer and had to undergo a tracheotomy which impacted upon it.
Back to the plot, such that it is, and Brooks is known as The Brit (because he’s from Britain), and given his impending release, a man known as The Brawn engages the services of two lesbians, The Babe and The Badass. At this point, the scripting wasn’t giving me a good feeling, but there was still over an hour to go in this movie; and we still had The Brains and The Don to be introduced, but this ain’t no Godfather movie.
The upshot of the plot is that Brooks simply gets together with his old crew, in order to dig out a bag of cash that’s been in the ground for those past five years, containing $33m, whilst evading the authorities… well, just Val Kilmer, really… and that aspect feels like it takes up around 15 minutes of the 86-minute running time. Will the gang manage it? Will you care?
Paydirt takes forever to get anywhere, and even when it does, it’s a load of cliches and everything we’ve seen before in a movie like this. In addition, there’s terrible CGI when people get shot, which looks like someone ran the film through Photoshop and added some red splodges for blood.
In addition, I saw this as a preview where there were no subtitles, and a lot of the dialogue is mumbled, which didn’t help.
Paydirt is released on Monday August 24th on DVD. It’s also due on some streaming platforms, but it’s not on Amazon which is the one I link to.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 86 minutes
Release date: August 24th 2020
Studio: Uncork’d Entertainment, Ton of Hats, Octane Entertainment, Seskri Productionz
Format: 2.39:1
Rating: 1/10
Director: Christian Sesma
Producers: Jack Campbell, Luke Goss, Mike Hatton, Christian Sesma
Screenplay: Christian Sesma
Cast:
Damien Brooks: Luke Goss
Sheriff Tucker: Val Kilmer
Geoff Bentley: Mike Hatton
Tony: Paul Sloan
Leo Cap: Nick Vallelonga
Layla: Mirtha Michelle
Cici: Veronika Bozeman (as V.Bozeman)
Janel (The Babe): Murielle Telio
Kioko: Mary Christina Brown
Security Guard: Vince DeCosta
Francesca: Teodora Djuric
Parade Attendee: Jack Grimmett
News cameraman: Russell Jones
Jamie: Mercedes Kilmer
Rosco: Lorin McCraley
El Gordo Godinez: Jay Montalvo
Smith: Mark Sherman
Agent Rinks: Rodney Tethal
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.