Sean Blakemore deserves much better than this.  Who is Sean Blakemore you might ask?  Sean Blakemore is an African American actor who I’ve seen in about three or four of these Black themed, Direct-to-Video God-awful romance / action pictures.  Mr. Blakemore, in my uninformed and worthless opinion, has some star potential.  He’s an above average actor, obviously works out a lot, has some screen presence and though I’m not gay or anything, he’s not a bad looking dude.  Understand that Man-Law prohibits me, or any other straight guy for that matter from commenting on how handsome some dude might be without first inserting the line ‘I’m not gay or anything …’  To keep it real, the line actually is ‘I’m not a f*g or anything, but…’ but since we’re not trying to go all Isaiah Washington out on the alternate lifestylers around here, we’ll roll with gay.  Also note the clever use of the ‘*’.  Which means I can say f*g, f*ck, n*gga,b*tch, but I really didn’t because I used the ‘*’ .    Also note that the usage of the line is not necessary when commenting on how messed up some dude looks.  For instance, simply saying ‘Damn Flavor Flav sure is ugly’ is more than acceptable.  To the corollary however, say one was to comment ‘I’m not a f*g or anything, but Damn Flavor Flav sure is fine.’  Thus the ‘I’m not a f*g’ precursor is superseded by the ‘Damn Flavor Flav sure is fine.’ comment, therefore making the commenter very gay as well as blind.  Man-Law class is over for today.

‘Restraining Order’ is a little independent film written and directed by one Reggie Gaskins.  It tells the story of possibly the most abhorrent character I’ve ever seen in any movie at any time, Diane McNeil (Robin Givens) who is married to blue collar Dante (Blakemore) but lusting after high flying lawyer Russ (Gaskins).  Diane is f*cked up beyond all reasonable belief.  She apparently hates her husband with a passion,

who has done nothing but buy her stuff and kowtow to her every need.  When suddenly she asks for a divorce, Dante is understandably upset and asks for an explanation.  Diane responds with ‘It’s just that I…’ and she pauses for what seems like a half hour while we all sit around waiting for her to f*king say something, before walking away.  Dante goes ballistic, but agrees to move out in the hopes of a reconciliation.  Then for no particular reason, Diane request a restraining order on Dante to keep him away from her, his son and their home which make him go, er, ballisticker. 

Dante has it in his crazy head that his wife is having an affair with stud lawyer Russ.  Maybe because his wife constantly says ‘why can’t you not suck, an be more like Russ’, or because she goes to the court house and watches Russ do his lawyering, or because she kisses the married Russ on the lips just say goodbye, or because she says constantly ‘why can’t you not suck and be more like Russ’.  Soon Dante is pretty much ballisticked out which leads to final act like I’m sure you’ve never experienced.

There are problems folks, this we can’t deny.  At its core is the Robin Givens character who is so unpalatable, that by the time Dante finds a gun, you hope and pray that he runs, not walks and empties it in her.  But Gaskins and his crew really waffle on what the character should be it seems.  When Diane calls her lawyer to wail and cry about how Dante just left the house in a rage and is going to kill her, she’s obviously lying.  But when she hangs up the phone, instead of giving us that sly, evil minx-like glance, she continues to cry as if she actually believes she’s telling the truth.  I hope we aren’t supposed to believe that Dante is really trying to kill her, because it’s fairly obvious that he’s not.  Maybe we just supposed to believe that Diane is nuts?  Beats me.  ‘Restraining Order’ may have been better served just making Diane a straight out evil femme fatale as opposed to a confused stupid, senseless, whoring b*tch.

Another problem is, like this review, it’s just too d*mn long.  Just this week I commented on how the makers of ‘Danika’ and ‘Grilled’ showed great respect to the audience by keeping those films under 80 minutes.  This thing runs about 105 minutes.  I just saw ‘Copying Beethoven’, a movie about freaking Ludwig Van Beethoven and the composition of the freaking 9th symphony, possibly the most important musical work in the history of modern man, and ‘Restraining Order’ was longer than that!  Mr. Gaskins, please!  Cook it down brother!  Cook it down!

There is some good though as Gaskins had the wisdom to cast stupid fine actress N’Bushe Wright as an obnoxious secretary and krazy fine actress Mari Morrow as Russ’ wife.  Lord this woman is beautiful.  I would have cast her as my wife too brother.  Gaskin shot one scene using the rather unique ‘across the tit’ angle.  Not the classic over the shoulder shot, but here he drops the camera down to tit level where the right side of the screen was filled with Ms. Morrow’s voluminous left breast (covered) while the subject she was talking to was on the left side of screen six feet or so away.  The problem with the ‘across the tit’ film technique is that for the life of me I can’t tell you what the characters were talking about.

Finally ‘Restraining Order’ goes completely off the deep end in a totally over the top final sequence which may call you into questioning your own sanity.  But despite it all, I’d be lying if told you this awful movie didn’t have some entertainment value, though a lot of it is unintended humor.  Here’s to Sean Blakemore getting a big break in a big movie and hopefully grab some of that stardom that I think he deserves.  And here’s to Mari Morrow birthing my children.  Just joking honey.