“Where did the gun come from?”
It seems like a simple question – posed by a police detective to a child who had just witnessed a home invasion. But the answer to that question is anything but simple. Changing Hands follows the journey of this firearm – first stolen by a petty thief from a Russian mob shipment and hastily tossed in a dumpster after an accidental shooting, then to the bum who found it and passed it on to a gangland henchman, who was subsequently robbed and shot with it, after which the robbers ditched it after a drive-by shooting and a passerby sold it to a fence who was also shot, then the gun was recovered by one of his employees, who ditched it in a phone booth after it accidentally went off, only to be snatched up by a passerby and used to settle a road rage incident...and that's only the beginning.
The movie begins with a detective arriving at the scene of a deadly home invasion. There is very little information given - only that one person is dead, and a little girl is a witness to the incident. With the detective's question regarding the gun, the scene suddenly switches to the beginning of its “journey” and the whole convoluted mess that follows. One might think that the whole thing would get very confusing for an audience; the list of on-screen characters is massive, and each one only pops up for a maximum of around ten minutes. The story also continues to wind for quite a while, which always has the potential for an audience to either get confused or bored. Thankfully, the movie manages to avoid a good deal of these potential problems. First, though very few characters are named, they all look unique and are of an easily identifiable type. In the scene where a kingpin's henchman is robbed and shot by some Latin gang bangers, it is a darkly-lit dock, but the Latin boys are introduced by their greeting of, “What's up, Ese?” Its a stereotype, but it clearly explains who they are and why the solo henchman is in big trouble. One mistake often made by first-time filmmakers is to cast one's friends in all the roles, but then one often winds up with a cast that has a very similar look, thus leading to audience confusion (in addition to the common problems of them not always being able to act very well). This particular cast has a wonderfully varied look which sets them all apart – and the inclusion of several recognizable stars didn't hurt either! (More on that later.)
The long, meandering storyline is certainly risky – it could easily become very repetitive with bodies piling up left, right, and center. But there is a lot of variety in both the people and circumstances that the gun finds itself in, and the cryptic opening of the film does well to keep the audience guessing as to when and how both story lines will intersect.
With that said, there were some logic, pacing, and continuity problems that still managed to find there way into the story, however. One thing that got repetitive was the phrase, “You shot me,” which was repeated several times by several different people. It's a very 'movie' bit of dialog and doesn't sound very realistic. Along with this, nearly everyone who is shot seems to have a similar reaction that accompanies this line. Thankfully there was no dramatic Hollywood-style flying backwards, but the victims should perhaps exhibit some more individual reactions.
In another scene, a man uses the gun to hold up a liquor store. There is the off-screen sound of a gunshot and the man bolts out the store, ditching the gun in a trashcan next to the front door, which is discovered by a passerby the next morning. Though its never explained whether the robber actually shot the clerk, it seems unlikely any police – even the LAPD – would have missed a gun sitting in the top of a trashcan, because it seems equally unlikely that a surviving clerk wouldn't have called them.
