Double Down (2005)

Absolutely my favorite film of all time, Double Down tackles intense issues of depression, love and loss, and the overwhelming battle of perfectionism. i've never had a film touch me as deeply as this film has. worth the watch and every subsequent viewing.

I don't need much to live on anymore. I just eat tuna out of the can and live in the car.

When I first saw this film with a friend on Skype, we joined our powers together in an attempt to create a coherent plot out of this nonsense collection of shots by the masterful genius known as Neil Breen. And now, in the spirit of Rich Evans from Red Letter Media, I will attempt to explain the plot of Neil Breen's Double Down.Neil Breen stars as Aaron Brand, a secret agent and hacker-assassin who has been trapped in an inter dimensional time loop by the AI robot construct he made out of the consciousness of his dead wife and stored in thousands of laptops he has strewn across the Nevada Desert. Every time he wakes up next to his car, he awakens in a new time line where he is forced to relive the kills he made as an assassin that he regrets the most.The AI consciousness of his wife has trapped him in this time loop as recompense for letting her die while they were together in the swimming pool, because if Aaron Brand died he would activate bombs all over the country and kill everyone in the United States. However, after Breen discovers God hiding in a cave in the desert with a magical rock, Aaron uses its magical powers to stabilize himself and finally determine what his reality must be.Now endowed with divine inspiration, Breenelects to destroy Las Vegas, Nevada and annihilate the thing that all of his previous kills and time lines have in common: they all took place in Nevada. So, in order to destroy Nevada but not regret his actions, he orders the evacuation of all the hotels on the Las Vegas Strip before he destroys Vegas forever.Now free of his personal hell, his robot ghost wife realizes that Neil Breen has discovered the true meaning of why she has been busting his balls for the past twenty years or something and allows him to live freely in one time line, destroying herself and all the laptops have house her consciousness.It's magical and I love it.

I saw a segment from the web-show 'Best of the Worst' which featured clips from this... do we call it a 'film'(?) It made me intrigued by just how insane the actor-writer-producer-director (also caterer-production manager-designer-music-score etc etc) Neil Breen made this tone poem about a man who becomes a sort of weapon against the world while also having the super-human ability to heal people with brain cancer and yet spends all of his time in the desert, living off of tuna fish cans and his several laptops where he organizes his plans to dominate and possibly blow up the world but hey it's okay because he "supports the troops" and mourns for his dead wife which... how did she die again?! This movie is utter, incomprehensible nonsense of a magnificent order. You can't believe what is before your eyes exists, but apparently through the sheer will-power of ego and drive, one man can make a movie by himself basically single-handedly - well, also, a lot, and I mean a LOT, of stock footage helps. Not to say the other actors (are they actors) help much (they don't), or any sense of forward momentum or drive. It almost appears like it's some sort of desperate plea in the guise of an espionage thriller narrative (hell, even on the front cover of the DVD the quote says "Stunning... desperation..." as if the critic, if it was one, was marking this as a cry for help).At the same time as an ego-trip spectacle of the worst order, it may be more unwatchable than The Room; at least in the case of Tommy Wiseau, he had a certain oddball, off-the-wall charm and deranged charisma (or just bafflement) that could keep your eyes glued. What makes Neil Breen such a train-wreck to watch is more-so the filmmaking, how it is apparently shot on film in 2005 but he and everything else looks like it was shot in the early 80's, and is over-loaded with a gargantuan amount of narration, and at times one wonders if this Neil Breen whoever has telekinetic capabilities with those he acts across on screen since he talks and we hear it without him moving his mouth (!)It's not a sight to recommend legitimately in any way shape or form - matter of fact it's one of the ten worst things ever committed to celluloid, like you halfway expect for the Beast at Yucca Flats to arrive - but if you decide to watch it with friends, it will be one of the great bonding experiences of your lives. Watching Double Down is like going through the trenches with an A-grade certified psycho who is full of himself and tuna and the electronic impulses giving him a heartbeat for some reason.