Moscow Chill (2007)

Ray Perso, an American computer Hacker, is caught when he makes all the ATM's in his city spew out money at the same time.  He is put in rehab rather than sent to jail, but while there is busted out by a couple of Russian thugs.  They bring him to Russia where he meets with the Russian Mafia boss they work for and is offered a job.  He is asked to hack into some bank accounts and steal 40 million in dirty money that the owners can't even report as missing.  He agrees to do the job and starts working on it.  When he takes a break from work he meets a beautiful young woman Maya and hits it off with her.  Soon he completes the job and gets the girl, but it can't be that simple can it?  Something always goes wrong.  He quickly finds himself way over his head, mixed up with the different factions of the Russian Mafia.

Moscow Chill is a decent movie.  It was fairly slow paced and never did get all that action filled.  At times it got a bit slow, but never dragged so much that you couldn't deal with it.  One interesting thing about this flick is that there are whole scenes in it where the characters are speaking Russian with no subtitles.  For the most part that doesn't hurt the movie at all and it helps to create an atmosphere where you empathize with Ray being so out of place.  The acting in the movie is pretty good which helps it survive being slow paced.  Another thing I liked is the soundtrack, which consisted of a lot of Russian music of various types.  It's also got several cute girls wandering around barely dressed in some of the scenes and an escaped circus bear!  Both of which are bonuses in my book.

This is a pretty good flick, but nothing exciting.  It's got a few parts that seem like they will be action packed, but they are over quickly and just sort of fade away.  There's no reason not to watch this film, but I personally wouldn't seek it out specially.

Moscow Chill is available from MTI and will be available on March 24th.  Head over to their website at http://www.mtivideo.com/ for more information. 

2 ½ out of 4

Reviewed by Scott Schwarzwalder