The Set Up Review
The Set Up is a 2016 feature film directed by Joseph Kandov.
The Set Up has some of the best and most eclectic fight scenes in any micro budget indie feature out there, but it is all completely undone by a myriad of technical and story issues.
The greatest compliment that can be given to this film is the amount of fight scenes it manages to cram in a two hour long runtime. The action starts from the very beginning and it never really let’s up throughout.
It is interesting then that the first thread that starts to undo any of this well choreographed and quite frankly well framed action is the audio mix itself. Filled with chops, drop outs and cartoonish sound effects, the viewer will be quickly pulled out of the action before it even has a chance to truly heat up.
It is a real shame too because it seems like the crew on set were more than capable of not only putting together fights but also knowing the proper way to capture it.
Going beyond this the visuals of the film also suffer from what seems to be some lower grade filming equipment. Either that or the compression in the final distribution file was pulling it all down.
As you sit down to the film you can tell that the cinematography was actually well handled outside of this. It was really just the camera itself that wasn’t up to the task.
Again it is really frustrating because it is so obvious that at the very core so many individuals put so much into this piece (as all productions tend to) but it really shows in what could have been. Something just seems to have happened in the post production work that really worked against the final product.
This comes as one that is hard to recommend as a result. The Set Up has a lot of adrenaline and action to it, but it suffers in most everything else. One wishes the equipment used all around was just a bit better as it all would have helped but ultimately the poor sound mixing and editing made this one a just plain tough watch.
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Cheers!
Daniel Hess
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