Paradox Effect centers on Karina (Olga Kurylenko), an ex-junkie who is trying to get her life together. Despite her addiction costing her marriage, she is still trying to do the right thing for her daughter. She works at a restaurant and is keeping her head clean. Everything changes for her the night before her daughter flies into town and she is forced into a night of chaos.
After leaving work, she witnesses a murder as a corrupted Interpol agent Covek (Oliver Trevena) guns down a person and then turns his attention towards her. After a brief high-speed chase with bullets flying, Covek’s car crashes and sets ablaze. While Karina thinks the danger’s over, her night’s just beginning! Covek quickly breaks into her car and takes her hostage and insists that she join him in his quest to save his child.
In Paradox Effect, it turns out Covek was actually a standup guy and had taken down big-time criminal Silvio (Harvey Keitel). The side effect of locking Silvio is that his unnamed son stepped up in the family business, and met his unfortunate demise. Silvio blames Covek and is making his life hell, kidnapping Covek’s son and forcing him to do his bidding, which means he has to find drugs and cash as payback. Karina witnessed Covek killing a drug dealer, and the crash made his newly acquired stash to go up in flames, so now Covek has to enlist Karina to score some more drugs to settle this debt.
Karina isn’t exactly a willing participant (who would be?), which creates a brief cat-and-mouse chase between the two, but soon enough she has her own problems as her daughter gets brought into the scenario, which causes her to step up and do what is necessary to save her child’s life from the clutches of Silvio. As the night goes into the wee hours in Paradox Effect, Karina and Covek dive deeper into Italy’s criminal underworld as they have to try and find this cash by any means necessary, and as both are desperate, so do their methods.
Paradox Effect’s premise should work and be an interesting film. Unfortunately, the execution is where the film is lacking. We are introduced to Karina as an ex-junkie who’s trying to pick up the pieces of her life after her divorce and recovery from substance abuse. However, within a few minutes of the start of Paradox Effect, she becomes an expert high-speed driver and later on, an expert marksman and skilled in hand-to-hand combat. While the notion that a parent will do whatever’s necessary to protect their child, feels unearned because the character change is so quick, we just see her as a badass from the beginning. In addition, the action scenes could use some better choreography as it’s very choppy. Throughout the film, there is almost a “narrator” summarizing the events (that we literally just watched) in the form of an Italian radio broadcast that both Karina and Covek listen to while driving around town. It’s a strange choice that proves distracting throughout the film. While the final act was a pretty good action sequence, it proved to be too little too late.
Paradox Effect showcases two dynamically different people having to work together through an insane scenario. They are combative, but still have to work together. And while the final product is for the most part a paint-by-numbers thriller, it’s still an interesting premise, and one that will probably be explored in other films, TV shows, or forms of pop culture in the future. Hopefully, it’ll be a bit different in the future, because it could work more effectively.
Paradox Effect is now playing On Demand.
