Slayground is an alarmingly fatalistic thriller, showing that the bleak, doom-laden era of film noir is still an imposing and pertinent force both stylistically and thematically. Indeed, it is one of the few films of the 1980s to be truly worth considering as an update of that genre, all the more fascinating for the ways in which it transposes its American conflicts to Britain, in the process evoking such seminal, and equally grim, UK thrillers as Get Carter. In that, it is both ambitious and surprisingly up to the task. Coyote essentially plays a man who is down on his luck and at wits end, forced in desperation to return to his past. His involvement in the death of an innocent girl is precisely the event that has doomed him: unless of course he can make some kinds of amends and appease Fate’s intentions. Indeed, all that happens to him after the robbery-gone-wrong is suggested as a kind of penance imposed by Fate, personified in the form of a disturbingly omniscient killer, whose first heard words are “you are talking to a machine”. It is a cold, hostile world where morality has been eroded into guilt and vengeance. With Fate thus personified, the evade and pursuit scenario exacts a primal, deterministic allegory and in so doing cuts to the essence of the crime thriller’s obsession with luck running out and the omnipresence of a cruel, punishing fortune. Few thrillers have been as slyly relentless as this one.
Slayground is one of the most effective of crime genre distillations, a stunning and creepily stylized film. The central idea of a man gradually realizing that his all-important luck is over but determined to persevere is powerfully rendered. In that, his complicated efforts to avoid his fate by escaping his would-be assassin are paralleled to the eerily omniscient ability of this killer to find his quarry anywhere. Some critics have seen this ease as a plot deficiency but it is necessary to develop the film’s allegorical overtones. Fate thus has no difficulty finding and tormenting its quarry and indeed sadistically thrives on it. This Fate is wholly unstoppable; a macabre artist of murder and Coyote’s battle becomes an elemental struggle for survival in a desperate world. Coyote may be waiting for his end but will fight it at every opportunity and perhaps in his stubborn defiance lies the possible means of defeating Fate. Yet, the law of this bleak existence almost demands that Coyote be punished, as if the accidental killing of the only innocent in this film is an unforgivable transgression, with Coyote’s remorse perhaps the only quality that has so far kept him alive. Fate, however, can only be eluded only so far before demanding some final act of contrition – death thus being the absolute restitution. So loaded, the sequence in which this showdown is rendered is one of the most dazzling and surreal showdowns in crime thriller cinema. read more