Natasha (2007)

★
There is a good idea buried in this mess of a movie, which is directed with incompetence and scored like a lurid soap opera. It's equal parts Russian gangster movie and erotic thriller, but their convergence is a sloppy concoction to such an extent that both elements suffer. Scenes were left in that should have been reshot, while the budget confined the action to such an extent that a family greets a Russian foreign exchange student at a train station in an English village instead of a major airport in London because shooting at Heathrow would have been more expensive, therefore expecting a teenager who speaks broken English to know how to get off a plane, take the tube and eventually hop on a train to the countryside without getting lost. Natasha is bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment.

I liked the concept. A stripper in Saint Petersburg named Anna (Algina Lipskis) witnesses her boss's murder at the hands of Russian gangsters. Those same gangsters mistake Anna's cousin Natasha for her and kill her too. Natasha already made arrangements to fly to England after successfully applying for a foreign exchange student program, so Anna assumes her identity and flies to Little Haven to meet her sponsoring family. John Loomis (Richard Lintern) is the town vicar who with wife Jan (Serena Gordon) has two children in son Robbie (Joseph O'Malley) and daughter Christine (Jenna Harrison). Now going by the name Natasha, the former Anna makes herself at home and doesn't hesitate to use her beauty to her advantage, like getting John out of a vehicle citation by diverting the cop's eyes to her figure.

Natasha's presence has a distracting effect on some of the townsfolk. The local field hockey coach takes a liking to her, though Natasha's street smarts get the better of him. Robbie is smitten with the Russian to the point that he sets up a webcam in the bedroom she shares with Christine. Back in Saint Petersburg, the police are investigating the two murders and determine that the slain Natasha was not the stripper Anna, making her current whereabouts a priority to find out who was responsible. I can see how this could have made for a tense thriller. A girl with a shady background hides out in the picturesque English countryside and puts her accepting family at risk by the people looking for her. The movie just looks like it was lazily stitched together with a dollar store sewing kit. Some examples: Anna/Natasha closes her boss's eyes after he was shot, though he clearly closes his own eyes. A bit player nervously licks her lips after reciting her lines. Elsewhere, the camera lingers on an actress who looks upset for no reason.

The movie isn't without moments of humor, but much of it is just easy laughs gleaned from the frequent nudity and Robbie's sudden interest in having a hot foreign exchange student living under the same roof. Christine reveals to Natasha that she likes girls, though the movie brings this up not to develop her character but to give us a make out session between the two, which leads to a ludicrous development in which Robbie broadcasts them on the internet and alerts the Saint Petersburg mob goons, who happen to be viewing the same website out of the millions of porn websites out there. The acting is uneven. The cast is a combination of professional actors and one-timers, with Richard Lintern giving the most solid performance here. Algina Lipskis has her moments, but the script doesn't place too many demands on her other than her frequent nude scenes.

Natasha had few artistic aspirations behind it. It looks thrown together with a maudlin soundtrack that might have been provided by the lowest bidder. Natasha's primary reason for traveling to Little Haven is to escape danger, but the filmmakers are clearly trying to demonstrate how this stripper (or exotic dancer, as Natasha prefers) could serve as a wake-up call to this sleepy little village and teach everyone a lesson about not judging a book by its cover and whatnot. I dislike how little care went into directing this story so that it could be worthy of carrying a message like this. I dislike how the director couldn't be bothered to reshoot scenes to correct easily-correctible oversights. There is a lot to dislike. It's so tepid that the erotic thriller label would be false advertising. An erotic headache is more like it.

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