First Date: Review

When Mike (Tyson Brown) manages to arrange a date with girl-next-door, childhood crush, and kickboxer Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), he realises there’s just one snag in his plan: he doesn’t have a car to pick her up in. On the advice of a friend, he heads off to buy a Toyota Camry for a suspiciously generous $300. What he ends up with is not a new-ish Camry, but an astonishingly beaten-up ’65 Chrysler New Yorker. Still, it has an 8-track deck and Kelsey is, funnily enough, a big 8-track fan. And where else is he going to get a car so cheap at such short notice?

However, what Mike isn’t aware of is that the car is stuffed with cocaine under every conceivable panel. Remember where the heroin was stashed in The French Connection? This car is an 18-wheeler to that car’s delivery moped. And so, soon enough Mike and Kelsey are beset by a gallery of grotesques, including a bickering mob of professional burglars/home invaders/literature enthusiasts, and a pair of are-they-incompent-or-are-they-corrupt cops (Samuel Ademola and, giving the film’s best comedic turn, Nicole Berry). Who’ll get away with the car? Who’ll get away with the coke? Who’ll get away with their lives?

Part of the fun of First Date is the rapid-fire and constantly-changing nature of the answers to these questions. With a set-up that recalls the darkly farcical nature of such struggle-for-the-MacGuffin movies as Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the Coens’ Fargo, and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan; the comedic chaos of Tony Scott’s (Tarantino-scripted) True Romance; and a climactic shoot-out that feels very indebted to Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, you can’t call First Date original. But then you can’t call it boring either.