This is a pretty amusing picture, as long as you watch it on fast forward. No, amusing is too generous. As a five to ten minute exercise in head shaking it is adequate. The more you watch the more you wonder who put up money for such a fiasco. *** SPOILER *** It's over an hour in before the protagonist irks the antagonist enough to to make him reroute the course of a ludicrous beauty pageant into a -- dare I say it -- martial arts contest. *** SPOILER *** Alert the media. Oh, wait, the media is already there. Anyway there are some guys in the control booth thinking they've got a hot number here. The more I think about what I saw the more pathetic it gets. The movie had a good poster. Probably has an okay trailer. Probably did okay at film markets. But the movie itself is boring drivel. Drivel is fine if it's entertaining. This is not.
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htwhyppe24 March 2006
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ccott25 August 2006I saw the cover for this, and being the sucker that I am, fell for it. Is there really anything cooler than a guy with two pistols and explosions? The acting is terrible, I mean TERRIBLE! I'll be glad if I never see Tony Schiena (he was in Jean-Claude Van Damme's Wake of Death, which was very good) or Luc Campeau make another movie. Script, are you kidding me? There is a relentless skirt-chasing A-list movie star,huge British mobster, and a bunch of bimbos out to make a buck; none of it even comes close to adding up. I had to watch the lip syncing scene three times, I can not believe this blatant lip syncing made it through (there is back-up singers on the audio track....) This is not a low budget Chuck Norris/ Jean-Claude movie with tons of action. Even the scene transitions sucked, I've seen better blackouts on Lifetime.
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selina_wragg21 June 2006Of all the films we've ever watched this has to be the absolute worst! You wouldn't even wish your worst enemy to watch this! What has Vinnie Jones been done! Surely he can't recover from this pile of poop! Worth a watch just for the fact it's so bad it's hilarious.
Don't even bother! It's worse than the cheesiest film you can ever imagine, times by ten, add a load of people who can't act and then sit on a chair full of razors!
Did someone really pay to budget this film? If so you must be a mug mate!
BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD! -
supertom-36 April 2006The Number One Girl may be better titled as "The Worst Film Ever!" What we have here is an advert for DTV avoidance and a film that perhaps only serves to make Steven Seagal's movies look a hell of a lot better. This is nonsensical garbage of the highest order.
The films plot is bizarre and perhaps the worst excuse for action I have ever heard. Action star Joey Scalloni (Tony Schiena) visits his old buddy Dragos (Vinnie Jones) in England. Dragos is a big time gangster who runs a brothel but also organises a world beauty pageant. Scalloni the big Hollywood star comes to England to judge the competition. The UK entrant is Tatayana, one of Vinnie Jones girls and favoured bits on the side and one of the first things Scalloni is told is not to think of trying it on with her. So for the first hour of this boring snoozes the film is essentially just Dragos and Scalloni hanging out like good old buddies whilst also watching over the pageant. Then during the swimwear judging competition, Scalloni is invited on stage to dance with the final ten participants, including Tatayana. This is by the way on live TV and with Dragos watching from the best seat in the house. Scalloni for little apparent reason decides to damn near have full sex with Tatayana on stage with millions watching. This leads to Dragos going nuts, and hijacking the building. He gives Scalloni an ultimatum: Fight his way through his goons and Dragos himself, or he and the girl die! It's as moronically simple as that! The last 20 minutes is purely Tony Schiena fighting numerous enemies, one at a time in the same place. It's all dully choreographed and poorly performed, looking more like practice, blocking tapes.
So the plot is nonsense but does the cast pull this through? Nope, not at all. Schiena, who wasn't bad in Wake Of Death, is terrible given a lead role here. He's wooden, amateurish and really just plain old bad. Vinnie Jones is also terrible. Lisa McAllister stars as Tatayana, the number one girl, and although she's suitably gorgeous, she's a terrible actress too. In fact there are a host of terrible actors who seem as if they were hired off the street. It's home movie acting at its worst. That goes hand in hand with the mundane, home movie type cinematography and this film, reportedly shot for $5 million, is seemingly much, much less than that. Only a sadly frail looking Pat Morita, in one of his last roles, retains any pride here, and even he is shockingly below par. Director Luc Campeau is terrible and in his debut here, fails to create anything remotely interesting or exciting aside from the promising opening scene. Truth is from the opening I thought this film showed promise, with a nifty credits sequence combining with a glimpse of Scalloni shooting the final scene of his latest blockbuster. It's nicely edited and an interesting sequence which only makes the diabolically bad remainder of the film, all the more shocking. This is something to avoid at all costs and has no redeeming qualities. * -
guitarcarl25 June 2006I'm not sure why Pat Morita would agree to be in a movie like this. His performance was the only sort of acceptable part in the entire film and it was brief and insignificant. The script is terrible the acting is sorry and silly. The camera angles left me with a neck ache. The center of the movie was long boring and pointless. The action sequence at the end was both macabre and silly. The music was tedious and annoying. Every character was underdeveloped. The love story which was pivotal to the incredibly weak plot was insubstantial. Nothing! Not a single thing works in this movie. Only robots at the bottom of the screen would give this film a reason to exist.
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The one star was for Vinnie alone, nothing in this film was worth while. I stupidly bought it because Vinnie Jones is a cool actor, he was brilliant in Lock Stock and has that 'hard man' image down to a tee. I started watching with my mate and you notice the abysmal acting straight away, we thought it might get better but ended up fast forwarding a lot just to get to some action....which was awfully choreographed and poorly acted. Fight to the death!? It's an old cliché, but my grandma could have beaten up tony schiena's character. And what was all the slow-mo scenes about? At least I have a spare DVD case now and, who knows, if I run out of toilet paper I have a back up. If I were Vinnie I would be ashamed that I ever let tony Schiena beat him up...even if it was a movie. (I would have given this a minus number if I could....it's an hour or more of my life I will never get back!)
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Tony Schiena plays Hollywood action hero, four-time martial artist champion, and all around schmuck Joey Scalini. After wrapping up on a current production, he travels to England to visit his long time gangster friend Dragos Molnar (Jones), and to act as a co-judge in an internationally televised beauty pageant called the Miss Fashion and Cosmetics World Competition, which, by the way, is also sponsored by Dragos, the intent being to put a legitimate face on his criminal enterprises. Joey soon finds himself surrounded by beautiful women, but one in particular catches his eye, the contestant from the United Kingdom named Tatiana (McAllister), who, in fact, turns out to be Dragos' number one girl you see, Dragos, while married with children, shares his home with any number of women whom he grooms for success, the only stipulation being they allow him to snog them whenever he feels like it (apparently Dragos and his wife have an understanding). Anyway, as the "competition" begins, we're treated to some really rotten lip syncing by various contestants (here's a tip, when fake singing, actually hold the microphone to your gob instead of waving it around that way it might appear to the more moronic viewers the words coming off the tape are actually coming from your mouth), followed by the swimsuit competition held in Dragos' new nightclub (the Nigerian contestant sure sports a lot of junk in her trunk). After a couple really lousy, hideous rap acts stink up the joint, the contestants and judges start dancing, allowing Joey to grind on Tatiana in front of Dragos who's sitting in audience, to which he reacts by kicking out the audience, barring the doors, and turning the place into an Ultimate Fighting Championship arena, as Joey must now fight not only a series of Dragos' muscle bound bodyguards, but finally Dragos himself in an all or nothing scenario. If Joey wins (no one wins with this film, especially not the viewers) he gets to leave with the girl, and if he loses, well, let's just say it's the end of his supposedly promising career (along with his life) oh, did I mention all of this is being televised around the world?
I wanted to like this movie (I like the Vinnie Jones), I really did, but it was just so damn disappointing. If you're coming into this looking for some action, I'd suggest skipping the first hour all together, as it's only a overly long, drawn out, and painful set up for the big fight sequence at the end. Even when the action does cut in, it's really not worth it given how poorly it was executed and shot. I did learn a number of things while watching this film, though
1. Internationally televised beauty pageants sponsored by gangsters are most likely fixed. 2. London is the style capital of the world. 3. One way to deal with being in love with a woman you can't have is to make it with two, sleazy women simultaneously. 4. If you're a beauty contestant who is also the property of the guy running the show, don't sing a song about being in love with someone else and make cow eyes towards that person while performing, as it tends to really upset your sugar daddy.
There were quite a few things wrong with this movie, the main elements being the rotten script, predictable story, and the simplistic direction. The acting felt shoddy throughout, but I'd attribute that more to the three, previously mentioned factors than the performers themselves. I really didn't care for the main character much, as he seemed like a real sleaze, only interested in scoring with babes. At one point he claims to be in love, but then we see him making the scene with two women while looking at the headshot of the woman he's supposedly in love with, as if to say "Yeah, I'm making it with two babes, but I'm really thinking of you", which comes off as somewhat repulsive. To top it off, the guy was a real idiot, putting the moves on a woman he had been told numerous times by his gangster friend to stay clear of, with the threat of severe bodily harm implied. The dialog is incredibly insipid, often trying to sound all cool and such, but failing miserably, which really drags that first hour out into a real painfest. This isn't helped by the direction, as the movie is populated with flashbacks, recollections, unsteady, up close shots, and a whole lot of slow motion sequences and establishing shots (we get it, the story takes place in London given all the cockney accents and the visual of Big Ben enough with the traveling montages already). It seemed like the director tried to incorporate an 'arty' feel using tricks he'd perhaps seen others employ, only here it was obvious and only served to disrupt the overall flow. The big fight sequences in the last fifteen minutes wasn't all that thrilling, especially since one would have to figure Joey would make it through the various thugs in order to get to the big showdown with Dragos. As far as Pat Morita, I don't know what his purpose was in the film, other than to pick up a check and lend his name to the production, as his character was fairly insignificant to the story. All in all unless you were in this film as an extra, or are a glutton for cinematic punishment, I really can't see anyone going out of their way to see this dud as it was about as much fun as stepping on a toenail clipping imbedded in the carpeting in the middle of the night on your way to relive yourself.
Cookieman108 -
Korch24 January 2009.... does a movie so bad, so wooden, so awful, and so painful get made. How this movie was ever green-lighted is beyond me. I can't believe Vinnie Jones agreed to be in this abomination. The acting was worse then that of soft-core porn thespians seen on Cinemax at 4 am. The script must have been written by a retarded monkey, with a typewriter. The director might as well have been Helen Keller. And the soundtrack was some of the worst music I have ever heard in my life. I bet that is the elevator music that plays in hell.
If you haven't figured it out by now..... I hated this movie with all my heart and soul. If I could go back in a time machine and either stop Hitler's reign, or this movie from being made, it would be a difficult choice. -
zardoz-136 April 2008Amateurish at best but boring at worst, "The Number One Girl" gives even pedestrian R-rated potboilers a bad name. Resist the urge to watch this direct-to-video tripe about a green-eyed gangster, a gorgeous gal, and cretinous action hero. Okay, I realize that Vinnie Jones of "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" endows this movie with some marginal marquee value, and I bought this DVD at a Movie Gallery clearance sale based on Jones and the "Karate Kid" star Pat Morita. The DVD box cover with a sartorially suited Jones holding two automatic pistols in a signature John Woo stance also lured me into shelling out my shekels this execrable epic. Moreover, clocking in at 85 minutes, I thought it would be a blast. Wrong on all counts! "The Number One Girl" makes "The Condemned" look like Oscar winning material. The starreal-life martial arts competitor Tony Schiena of "Wake of Death"makes Casper Van Dien look like Sir Laurence Olivier. Mind you, Lisa McAllister is a babe, but she is not enough to make this melodramatic muck memorable. Production Manager turned director; Luc Campeau makes a pathetic directorial debut. Granted, "The Defender" scenarist Douglas W. Miller had a modicum of a good idea, but Campeau does nothing invigorating with it. The first big action scene in the beginning has no voltageeven though it's a movie-within-a-movieand later scenes, particularly the multiple fights in the last quarter-hour are comatose. Incidentally, in the foreshadowing department, one of the characters uses the familiar "Star Wars'" line: 'I got a bad feeling about this." Gee, were they right! Vinnie, making crap like this is going to ruin your credibility. In fact, the less said about this forgettable film, the better. Peruse the other reviews for more details about this drivel, but don't rent, buy, or watch this wretched rubbish. Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!
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imdb-1745729 December 2007Just turned up in Melbourne, Australia in December 2007. Never a good sign! Not only straight to video, but late to video.
I've seen Vinnie Jones drag other crappy movies from total crap to watchable crap (say Condemned or Slipstream). A true scenery chewer, one of the best.
But even Jebus himself couldn't have saved this woeful turkey. Started bad, got worse and surprisingly even worse.
I can tolerate the bad acting, the bad script and bad music but the direction was truly pedestrian.
Avoid at all cost, I want by 2 dollars and 2 hours back! -
tarbosh2200012 May 2010"The Number One Girl" is the front runner for worst movie of the year. I can't hate this movie more if I tried.
The plot is about Joey Scalini (Schiena) who is asked to be a judge in a beauty pageant run by his old friend Dragos Molnar (Jones) who is also a gangster. Joey eventually falls for the title character Tatiana (Lisa McAllister). But Dragos doesn't like that and he goes insane. He closes down the pageant after party and turns it into a fighting ring. Now Joey has to fight Dragos and his bodyguards to the death!
Everything about this movie is absolutely terrible:
The acting: Tony Schiena has put in better work in the Van Damme flick "Wake Of Death" but shows no talent or charisma here. Vinnie Jones needs to get this one off his filmography fast. He's better than Scheina, but not by much.
The pacing and directing: The movie is less than 90 minutes but it feels like an eternity. The directing is filled with static shots of nothing happening. In the pageant scene he's not even trying to cover up the fact that the contestants aren't singing(or acting for that matter).
The fighting: The fight scenes are downright awful. Every move is cut too fast so you can't see what's going on. Seagal's stunt doubles are better than these fighters.
In the end, trust me, you never want to see this... ever!
For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com -
akshay270431 March 2010looking at the poster, it certainly catches your attention... looking at the cast you see vinnie jones and Pat Morita, you would be tempted to give it a chance... But watching the movie is a real pain in the a$$. in every category, it wins the worst prize. cheaper by the dozen has better actions....
for me this film is incredible... a film like this can be made only once in a while. there can be another titanic or dark knight, but a The number 1 girl is such a rare film... there can be no director with such talents... according to me it really deserves an academy award, for the worst thing in the life of a person who has watched this film... -
coop7203 August 2008The most retarded script, plot, acting and general movie.
The acting is rather draining and so superficial. There's no emotion or convincing me these actors really fit the role. All Vinnie Jones does is act cockney and shout "slut" and "bitch" for most of the movie and Tony Shiena plays a horribly sporadic character who you know, you just want to stab.
The music is horribly repetitive and sleazy, but well-played, but obviously not well-thought-of. Needed a bit more flesh and interesting movie conventions that a soundtrack needs.
Just don't buy it, you know it will be bad and everyone is saying it and please don't recommend it. -
johnnyboyz5 November 2009There are bad films; there are really bad films; there are absolute turkeys.........and then there is The Number One Girl; a film so dreadful, so badly thought through, so horribly put together that seeing is believing – I have two regrets regarding it: the first is that I even sat down to watch it while the second is that it was a direct to video release and as a result; the critics never got the chance to tear this monster the 'new one' is deserves. The film, and incidentally one of the worst of the decade out of the countless many I've seen, is a cosmic blow out of truly epic proportions: a cinematic tsunami; a volcanic eruption of badness; a sorry, woeful excuse for a feature film. A film that begins with a fake-trailer to an action film that exists purely within this movie's universe, and ends with the most absurdest of finales. I think the immediate opening was a fun poke at action films, complete with fancy camera gimmicks and stunts – the truly frightening thing is that's exactly what this picture ends up as.
The film, made by one-time only director Luc Campeau, sees a production assistant take the helm of the piece while a mixture of supporting talent and mere extras adopt the lead roles around which former footballer Vinnie Jones and the easily identifiable Pat Morita operate. It's too bad that everyone looks like they've each strolled onto the screen out of separate films. Jones' character of Dragos Molnar, who might be foreign with that sort of name but possesses a pretty good English accent, heads a beauty competition over in the English capital of London in which he invites American action film star Joey Scalini (Schiena) to partake in the judging. Scalini gets all the fancy treatment whilst over there with the added bonus he gets to meet all of the beautiful women gathered there for the show. But there is one rule: don't go getting 'too close' to any of the contestants.
The laying on of that final point is painful. Dragos dangles the carrot, and the film sees its lead character gobble it up with guilty, obligatory joy. The film is a one note documentation of a man's would-be gradual descent into obsession with the forbidden fruit, a piece that scandalously ignores practically every other item it has going for it by way of what this beauty show is all about; why it even exists; why Dragos is so unhinged and overly protective of the contestants and how such a volatile man came to be so rich and so well en-downed with a family. The film is an emotional dead-zone; a love story that doesn't exist between two people who are not even characters, but just exist on screen – best (or should that be worst?) highlighted during a woeful, painful, excruciatingly bad montage in which a character engages in gym activity and narrates his deep feelings for one of the women contestants to himself. All that's missing from this segment is a blinking green beacon in the corner of the screen and a subtitle telling us that "This is where everything will change and stuff happens."
As a lead, Joey is established as hard-bodied and somewhat 'typical' thanks to the opening fake-trailer, but the film ultimately becomes what it sends up. I don't know how most other people roll, but I find beauty contests such as the one involved to be pointless, leery, horrid, disgusting things in the first place; and yet the film has no statement on them or their existence in the world, instead goes to great lengths to establish 'so-and-so' are favourites and that they hope 'such-and-such' will win but it all amounts to absolutely nothing, bar an excuse for the film to encompass some shots of glammed up women in little outfits. Joey is a judge, of whom are equally despicable in their own way. But we're allowed to like him because we're led to believe, through the aforementioned emotionless montage. The voice-overs during this segment sound like they're being read by the actor, there and then for the very first time, off of a piece of paper. It turns out he has a soft spot for the lead contestant Tatiana (McAllister): a girl with a Russian sounding name, being played by a Scottish actress whose filmic nationality I don't recall; English, I think. The actress that plays her's largest cinematic role since was as a 'Passenger' in 2008's The Dark Knight.
Everything about The Number One Girl is dead on arrival. The action archetype send up; the chemistry between the two leads; the fact they're filming on public, non-closed off streets around London with members of the public looking in on the shooting; the manner in which I'm pretty sure the Nigerian contestant's name changes half way through; the way in which the film descends into messy, brainless thumping and pounding as violence and fighting becomes the order of the day when Jones goes absolutely spare out of the blue when two characters are actually dumb enough to cavort in front of everyone – it's big, loud and dumb whilst not much fun. Somewhere in there is some sort of statement about 'What is entertainment?' and 'What do we accept to be perfectly fine televisual content these days?' with the whole finale to do with going so far enough to kill someone in front of a packed TV audience; but it's all hopelessly lost in a hapless and painful exercise. The Number One Girl is an absolute disaster: a train wreck, a motorway pile-up, a capsizing of a ship all happening at once as a comet crashes into the ongoing madness and mayhem. One wonders what might happen if you were to bring this film up in a mocking fashion whilst in Vinnie Jones' presence; more of the immediate above, I would think. -
Zyxyzmusic21 February 2011You can see the appeal when pitched - gangster and Hollywood star fight over beauty pageant favourite - but the execution from dialogue to staging is so horrible as to miss out on any possible positive result. The poor acting of the leads is only emphasised by assigning them long, rambling voiceovers in addition to dialogue, and the approach to the beauty pageant is incredibly 1970's and misogynistic, like a 12-year-old's staging of the whole idea.
Hidden somewhere is a worthy plot about international exploitation - something like "Traffic" - but it's incredibly well concealed. Meanwhile everything looks exactly like the budget available - the beauty pageant is in a London theatre but a really small one, the gangster's supposedly plush house is errrrr... kinda OK but not really spectacular. The music is adequate but doesn't really sound like it was composed for this movie, which must be some kind of problem...
It all feels bizarrely as if no-one involved with the entire process actually had English as their native language, which is ... really weird. The oddest thing is that it doesn't LOOK like one of those Z-list, shot on video, indie exploitation movies you find in Pound shops (though that's where I found it), it's just really, really badly done.