Review: Go For Sisters (2013)

Cast: LisaGay Hamilton, Yolonda Ross, Edward James Olmos
Director: John Sayles
Country: USA
Genre: Crime | Drama | Thriller
Official Website: Here

Editor’s Notes: Go For Sisters opens in limited release Friday, November 15th.

In a lot of ways, Go For Sisters feels like a movie out of time. It’s a crime film about drugs, coyotes smuggling people across the border, and the seedy underbelly of Tijuana that never develops a strong enough style or tone to feel at home as a noir or as a bit of realism. The evil-doers that populate this world are just that—bad guys, plain and simple, more of the sort you’d see in an after school special about the ills caused by drug use than what you’d expect in a more complex, nuanced work. However, the film does have one distinct advantage, in the way it slowly builds out its central characters. The details of their lives, their histories, and their bonds are slowly filled in, often in the form of writerly monologues that the actors dig into with zeal, but over the course of the film they come to feel lived-in.

In a lot of ways, Go For Sisters feels like a movie out of time. It’s a crime film about drugs, coyotes smuggling people across the border, and the seedy underbelly of Tijuana that never develops a strong enough style or tone to feel at home as a noir or as a bit of realism.

The film follows Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton), a hardened parole officer with one marriage behind her and another relationship crumbling in front of her. Bernice is given a new case and comes face to face with her childhood friend Fontayne (Yolonda Ross), who has been in trouble her entire adult life. Against her better judgment, Bernice gives Fontayne a break, and to repay her, Fontayne agrees to help when Bernice’s son goes missing, likely mixed up in the drug trade and possibly kidnapped and taken across the border. The two turn to Freddy Suarez (Edward James Olmos), a compromised former LAPD officer to help them find Bernice’s son.

Go For Sisters is vintage John Sayles for the way it develops these three central characters over the course of its runtime. Bernice and Fontayne are old friends driven apart by a past betrayal and slowly growing back together. They have lived very different lives in the decades since they were told they could “go for sisters” because of their similar looks, and the film draws out each of these, and how it looks to the other, with subtle grace. Olmos also turns Freddy Suarez into a multi-dimensional figure, the sort of weathered detective who populates plenty of noir films, but with pain and world-weariness that resonate. His dedication to helping Bernice (who is going to pay him handsomely) takes him closer and closer to the edge, but the character always remains distinctly human. As a study of the intrapersonal relations of these three characters, the film is often a thing to behold.

Go For Sisters is vintage John Sayles for the way it develops these three central characters over the course of its runtime.

Unfortunately, for much of its runtime, it is something else entirely. It’s clear the film aspires to be another installment in the growing genre of Southwest noir, but it lacks the style, the flare, and the dramatic incident to actually qualify. The “mystery” at its center is less a MacGuffin than an emotional drive that never resonates emotionally. Things get worse once the film actually descends into the “seedy underbelly” of Tijuana, which is populated with flat gangster archetypes who never develop color, and where the plot continues to amble along, never developing any real suspense. Almost all of the violence takes place off-screen, which lends the film a tranquility directly at odds with its theoretically pulse-pounding plot.

A different film would have focused more on the way Bernice is forced to develop empathy as she encounters the criminal element she has been dispassionately dealing with in her career as a parole officer. Yet while that arc always bubbles beneath the surface, it never gets the chance to fully develop. The film gets too quickly distracted by the crime-drama it dreams of being to ever fully become the layered character study it might have knocked out of the park. Sayles tends to pack his films with social commentary, and Go For Sisters has that in spades. If the film had focused on that aspect, or on the characters at its center, instead of being distracted by the noir trappings that never quite fit, it may have been something to behold. Instead, its pulp feels too familiar, the ragged edges sanded off entirely until it resembles nothing so much as a meaty character piece that for long stretches forgets just how much its central ensemble has to offer.

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Jordan Ferguson

Sr. Staff Film Critic & Editor of Television

Jordan Ferguson is a lifelong pop culture fan, and would probably never leave his couch if he could get away with it. When he isn’t wasting time “studying the law” at the University of Michigan, he writes about film, television, and music. In addition to writing for Next Projection, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Review To Be Named, a homemade haven for pop-culture obsessives. Check out more of his work at Reviewtobenamed.com , follow him on twitter @bobchanning, or just yell really loudly on the street. Don’t worry, he’ll hear.

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