Sirona
You can’t say Wesley Clark doesn’t have ambition. Sirona is not only his first feature but also his sole IMDB credit, and he took on the triple duty of writing, directing, and starring in it. That’s to say nothing of his decision to try and make an X-Men movie on a decidedly non-blockbuster budget that almost never goes well.
Sirona (Ashlynn Hideman, Deadly Promises, My Amish World) and her brother have escaped from a government Black Site called Valkyrie. Their absence has not gone unnoticed; they are being pursued by several armed men. Her brother manages to kill some of them with some kind of strange power, which is enough to let her get away before they take him down.
In response, a team of mercenaries comprised of Allan (Jeremy Calcote, Draco Ortus, Curse of the Black Lagoon), Jason (Ben Johnson, Jurassic Thunder, The Jurassic Dead), Julie (Sarah Klaren, Alarmed, Invocation) and Tuck (Wesley Clark) is dispatched to deal with her. The crew has its own internal issues mostly revolving around their tracker/sniper Julie who is Jason’s brother replacement killed in action and she can’t seem to do anything good enough for him.
By this point you’ve probably already guessed that Sirona and her brother are the result of human experiments at the facility. But just in case you didn’t… well she gets into it with Calvin (Rafael Velasquez Fettered Art of War), whose cabin she holes up in.
With its obviously low budget Sirona is naturally going to rely as much if not more on dialogue than action scenes; there was once upon a time when that was the norm for movies about people with superpowers. If you’ve seen any made for TV superhero joints from the 70s or 80s you know exactly what I mean. It’s only very recently that any movie involving super-powered mutants is expected to have a nine figure budget.
The good thing about Clark knowing better than to try and match those films’ effects with cut rate CGI or make an action film with no action is that Sirona can keep its effects to some simple CGI and spend more time on the ethics and morality of the situation. Which is something that a number of MCU movies have done, but always in the background as a justification for all those action set pieces.
Unfortunately, Clark has bitten off more than he can chew with so many early career hats. The biggest problem is that the dialogue tends to be stilted and on the nose most of the time. Compounding this, some of the performances have a strange disconnected feel to them as if they had been recorded separately (which they probably were) and then dubbed in (which they definitely were). I’d say it was the result of performers trying to sound like emotionless professional killers if so much of the plot didn’t involve them relying too heavily on their emotions for each other’s comfort.
Eventually Morrow (Shale Le Page, Monster Force Zero, Tsunambee), the squad’s boss shows up demanding Sirona be killed, and for the last half-hour or so it drops back into action mode. For what it is given to work with, it does a pretty good job at it give or take some of the worst shooting this side of a Star Wars movie.
Sirona is not bad as a start, but it still misses its targets. The talk needed to be seriously reworked and it should have delved more deeply into the problems it brought up. You get the feeling from the end scenes that there may be a sequel. If there is, I wish for another script with it.
On September 5th, Cranked Up Films will release Sirona on VOD and Digital Platforms. Check out their Facebook page for more information about the film.
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