Review of Go With God (2016) by Ersbryson B — 18 Jan 2016

A gangster art house film is born!

Adios vaya con dios gets into a rhythm from the very beginning of the film. It plays like an international art house film, with long musical montages and two opening credit sequences, as if the editor unequivocally liked them both. You can escape with trying newfangled things in independent film and I sense Adios vaya con dios did just that. The blending of professional actors with real gangs, real people from the streets, to mixing the entire film with euro rock, a gangster art house film is born!

Yes, Adios vaya con dios is an art film; it is an experimentation of what happens when you put thugs, gangs and neighborhood residences into a film. One would contemplate the film may be a disaster, maybe even hazardous, nevertheless the movie uses what some people would believe to inevitably become its weakness as its ultimate strength.

We follow lead actor and writer Zachary Laoutides, Rory King, through his odyssey of his plans to skip town only to have his friend Eloy get released from prison tossing his plans of escape out the window. Laoutides gives an almost silent performance authorizing the ghetto to speak for itself; we see his pain and suffering every step of the way within his distraught senses. I speculated why he would have written his part so introverted, but it makes complete logic as so many in the inner cities become the outcasts of society and let their gang in numbers be their voice. What's even worse for Rory King is that he's white.

I appreciated the short-lived performance by Marius Iliescu playing the Olmec gang leader Tiger as well as his young brother, Bones, played my Emmanuel Isaac. I thought both actors warranted some more screen time. One complicating element is that Rory and Tiger are both from the same gang. Tiger's last name is 'De'Leon' so do not confuse it as its own gang affiliation. So, heads up!

The movie plays inventive from start to finish, director and cinematographer Timothy J. Aguado's switching from black and white to color, to his stellar shots of Rory's burning off his tattoos. The film feels like a retro piece of cinema belonging in a foreign film classification with the Spanish narration. To his credit Laoutides' writing keeps a pace that never gets boring moving us from credit sequences, to music video montages, to life and death situations. We care about Rory from the opening scene and feel that he is in the wrong life, the wrong body and dealt the wrong cards.

Although this is a film you may only watch once it plants the seeds for another movie, which may be what Laoutides was going for. The iconic lines from the characters in the film and the overlapping stimulating storylines demands one more chapter.