Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pixie’ on VOD, a Clever-But-Derivative ‘90s-esque Caper Held Together by Olivia Cooke

Now on VOD, Pixie is a dark caper-comedy led by Olivia Cooke and set in Ireland, the former point soothing the apprehension inspired by the latter, since I’m still reeling from the rancid blarney of Wild Mountain Thyme, even three months hence. I can happily report that the Irish accents in Pixie are under control, and Cooke (so good in Thoroughbreds and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) is charismatic, and the script is very much in the McDonagh/Tarantino vein. I dunno, sounds more like a mixed bag than a sure thing, but let’s find out for sure.

PIXIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Faux-Morricone plays on the soundtrack. A woman stands at her mother’s grave. She vows to “set a bomb under this town” to find out who’s responsible for her death. This is Pixie O’Brien (Cooke). I think that’s her real name; seems plausible, I guess. Gigantic subtitle that fills the entire screen: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST OF IRELAND. Got it — references! Next scene: Two dopes, Fergus (Fra Free) and Colin (Rory Fleck Byrne) strap on creepy animal masks, pistols drawn, and enter a church. They want the drugs. The priests have the drugs. And the shotguns. Bullets fly. Got any qualms about seeing a gun-toting drug-running man of the cloth get blasted to hell? Me, not really. You, maybe. But this is one of those kind of movies, you know, bleak except in a funny kind of way. (Note, maybe the priests with shotguns should fight the hobo with a shotgun. Someday? Maybe someday.)

Pixie’s father Dermot (Colm Meaney) is a big-time gangster with a nice house with a spacious kitchen, lotsa clutter though. Dermot likes to cook and the place is lived-in, not one of those movie sets that gaslights you into believing that people exist with nothing on their countertops except a single bowl of fruit. He’s not Pixie’s biological da, but he raised her and loves her like his own, possibly because his own is a barrelgut suspenders-wearer, Mickey (Turlough Convery), who makes a sasquatch look like a Hemsworth. He’s his da’s enforcer. He hates Pixie. She hates him back. He holds her against a wall and chokes her. She takes it. Is this how gangster families live? I wouldn’t know; also plausible, I guess.

Cut to two different dopes than the first two dopes. These are of the non-criminal variety, at least not quite yet; they’re Harland (Daryl McCormack) and Frank (Ben Hardy). Horniness puts them at Pixie’s place, and fate puts Fergus just outside her door with a gun and the drugs, and then Harland puts Fergus in the trunk. Hit him with the car. Couldn’t have him charging in there, guns blazing. Now Harland, Frank and Pixie have a body and a bag of drugs worth a million Euro bucks, and nowhere to go with any of it. Well, maybe there’s a place to take the drugs, so they pile into the pale yellow vintage iron tank of a Benz that Harland drives, and hit the road. But see, there’s a million Euro bucks’ worth of fookin’ drugs missing, and that’s the type of situation that has guys like Pixie’s da and his rival gangster, Father McGrath (Alec Baldwin), paying attention — the type of situation that’s sure seems like it’s going to end with lots of people on the wrong end of a deadly flurry of irony.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pulp Fiction, In Bruges and all subordinates thereof; also Once Upon a Time in the West, he said, stating the obvious.

Performance Worth Watching: Cooke holds our attention with a performance that bullseyes the sweet spot between wiseass and earnest — not an easy task. She draws our eyes away from the supporting cast, which could use more color and less central-casting cliches.

Memorable Dialogue: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, all good children go to heaven,” Alec Baldwin’s gangster priest says as he counts out guns for his cadre of priest and nun henchpeople.

Sex and Skin: Just one steamy scene, ultimately unrealized.

Our Take: Pixie is one of those violent trifles that treats death as an inevitability to be laughed off in the name of our entertainment. I’m not being too terribly glib, promise. I’m amused by the Gen-X irony of such things, even when such things are about nothing except their ability to make references to cool movies, exercise clever dialogue and put Alec Baldwin in a frock to deliver an always-be-closing speech in clergy-mobster parlance.

Yes, this is highly derivative stuff — lively, swift-footed and nicely photographed derivative stuff. Which, if you’re going to make derivative stuff, that’s how you should make it. It’s twisty and funny, the plot wrapping around itself without getting lost in its own contrived circumlocutions. Director Barnaby Thompson has an eye for a sharp camera angle and guides Cooke to establish a tone that’s sly and winking but doesn’t nudge us out the door with a flurry of elbows in the ribs. It needle-drops Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” indulges a slo-mo shootout and sacriliciously peers in for a closeup of a statue of the Virgin Mary getting its head shot off as tears of blood run down its cheeks. Funny how fate in these movies always rewards the relatively virtuous, and here we are watching the visage of the mother of god take an incidental blast of lead right in the face. Maybe the movie has something to say after all; I think the institution of Catholicism can take it, though.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Pixie doesn’t offer us much beyond Cooke’s appeal and some sagacious visual execution — precisely the stuff that keeps modest genre exercises like this afloat.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Pixie