Boasting a microscopic budget (under $8000) and plenty of indie street cred thanks to a healthy showing at Sundance, this labor of love for writer-director-producer- star Joe Carnahan and co-producer/co-star Dan Leis (also a family affair, as half of their respective families participated on- and off-camera) might have once been unjustly lumped together with the seventeen thousand blood- drenched Tarantino knock-offs produced in the years following RESERVOIR DOGS. (Not to mention the distributors pretty much hyped it on those grounds.) Upon closer examination, you might discover this oil-spewing Mopar muscle machine actually owes more to David Mamet's GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS than to the hyper-violent shoot-em-ups of the mid-'90s, and comes out all the better for it.

Carnahan and Leis play uber-sleazy used car salesmen Sid and Bob, whose in-your-face & down-your-throat sales pitch would make Billy Mays soil his whiter whites in shame. Unfortunately for them, they're getting screwed even more than their customers, thanks to the big-money machinations of their chief rival, Mr. Woo (Dan Harlan), whose massive inventory and bottomless promotional resources are driving the boys' pathetic lemon farm into the shitter.

Deep in the red and mere days away from eviction, Sid & Bob are driven to desperate measures - culminating in a deal brokered by their deadbeat distributor Ray (James Slater), who's even sleazier than they are. The arrangement, directed by parties unknown, is deceptively simple: keep a cherry '63 Le Mans on their lot for 48 hours. This task will apparently net them $250,000 - half in advance - provided (a) they don't drive it anywhere, and (b) they don't open the trunk. Transgressing the first rule will result in the driver being ventilated by a redneck (Kurt Johnson) with a high-powered rile; violating the second will detonate several pounds of C-4 wired to the chassis.

The slightly more level-headed Bob can't work past his paranoia about what they're getting into, but Sid's greed and desperation override whatever common sense he might have possessed, and he eventually agrees to look after the car. What the boys don't know is that one pack of lowlifes after another have been gunning each other down to possess the Pontiac and its mysterious contents, and an ambitious FBI agent (Mark S. Allen) is dead-set on intercepting it, convinced the trunk holds a massive cache of drugs.

Fueled by too much booze (and a bullet in his leg from the trigger-happy cracker), Sid's paranoia starts to get the best of him, and he becomes convinced they're being set up. To make matters worse, he wants to hit the unseen offenders back. Hard. Against Bob's protests, he concocts a scheme to ransom the car and its contents for half a million bucks. An inevitable - but surprising - series of events sends the dominoes falling hard and fast, leading up to a real jaw-dropper of a final twist.

Much like Robert Rodriquez's similarly-budgeted EL MARIACHI, there's a surprising amount of action on display here, but the focus of the film's smart-assed energy is definitely Carnahan's razor-sharp dialogue. Delivered expertly by the director and his co-stars, the rapid-fire exchanges hit you on the chin like hammer blows and don't let up for a second. Despite a few too many "damn, I'm hip" flourishes (and excessive tips of the hat to Q.T.), most of the characters' anarchic rants are right on the money. Sid & Bob never really generate much sympathy (they're basically double-dipped assholes who'd scam their own grannies for a percentage), but they're never boring, and that's what counts here. Sure, the plot is seldom more than a vehicle for these characterizations, but I'd wager that the script's simplicity is its strength: like a punk-ass street racer, it's stripped down to the bare essentials for maximum speed.

Given the film's low-budget origins, it's hard to harp on the technical details of the 16mm source print, which was blown up to 35 and cleaned up by distributor Lions Gate... well, sort of. The resulting grain is about big as your fist in some of the interior scenes, and the lap dissolves & other transitions tend to steal some of the guerilla juice of the project in favor of a direct-to-video look, which is a shame. Nevertheless, the skill of John A. Jimenez's camerawork shines through - especially in his use of colored gels - and overcomes many of the technical limitations. (Any film student will tell you it's a bitch to light for 16mm.) The 2.0 audio is nothing to write home about - most of the left-right activity is devoted to the music track, while the dialog and sound effects sit pretty firmly in the middle - but it's clean and clear enough to punch up the characters' machine-gun banter.

Despite the weak spots that come part-and-parcel with indie filmmaking, this is a tough, energetic first feature from some scrappy and talented dudes. The success of this film propelled Carnahan to bigger and better projects, including the underrated sleeper NARC. Let's hope his attachment to the next MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE time-waster isn't a sign of Joe's devolution into yet another Hollywood whore. Only time will tell.