Alien Girl

In his feature debut, Bormatov doesn't much bother with things like character development, relying instead on raw brutality, profanity and sex. It shouldn't be long before the Hollywood remake with Angelina Jolie.

Offering a smorgasbord of violence with liberal sprinklings of sex, Russian import Alien Girl delivers wearisome brutality but little finesse.

There's insufficient suspense in the life-or-death stakes, sketchy plot detail in the gang clash that triggers the action and too little ambiguity in the intercharacter dynamics.

American viewers are unlikely to be interested.

From its title, Alien Girl seems to promise some kind of playful intergalactic adventure. That, it is not. Rather the film is a grim, artless Russian-made gangster picture that is neither stylish nor fun.

Romanycheva exudes cunning carnality, yet her wiles are as rote as the rest of this B-grade genre flick, which feigns interest in post-Communist Eastern European power dynamics but favors listlessly staged shoot-outs and heists devoid of emotional, psychological, or sociopolitical substance.

Soulless, joyless and depressingly graceless, Alien Girl plays like an early Guy Ritchie knockoff without the jokes or Cockney accents.