Finally, one thing that will be a major sticking point for some audience members, is realism when it comes to firearms. We all know that shooting a movie in California is difficult enough without worrying about the state's harsh gun laws on top of that, but there were some very big mistakes made here. The most obvious was a scene in which a fence lays out several guns for a customer, one of which is “our” gun. The man picks up a different gun and, while standing behind the fence, he pulls back the slide, which appears to close on an empty chamber. He then removes the magazine, revealing one bullet still in it. He then racks the weapon again, and shoots the fence. But as the gun is a semi-automatic, the initial action of racking the slide would have chambered a round, and racking it a second time would have ejected one and loaded another – best to cut out the first part and start with the shot of him checking the magazine.
Another issue arose later on the movie, a security guard is given the gun by a kid who is trying to get rid of it, and reports that it fires great. But considering that the gun was recently thrown out of a car window by an angry father who found it in his son's room, and its rapid changing of hands makes it unlikely to have been cleaned, its ability to fire would probably have been diminished at this point. In fact, a few fortunate misfires might add another element of interest; not to mention humor at the expense of wannabe tough guys who don't actually know anything about guns. (My editor tells me that the gun in question is a Beretta M9, which most users consider needs regular maintenance to work effectively. If the sidearm had been a Glock 19, then it would be more believable that it wouldn't misfire despite the abuse.)
It seems as though most actors in this film – while they clearly knew their craft very well – did not know much about handling firearms. In the instances where the gun was fired, several of the actors just jerked their hands up awkwardly to imitate the kick of the weapon. Though I can understand why one wouldn't want to use real firearms in California, the actors who will be shooting on screen need to be given at least a brief opportunity to actually shoot a similar gun to the one that they will be handling. On MFM's recent action project Depleted: Day 419, director Jeremy Hanke chose to use all high quality airsoft guns rather than “real steel” guns (with the exception of a single shotgun that fired a special primer round), but still took members of the cast to a local range and had them practice with different types of guns – the added time and expense certainly went a long way to enhance the actors' performances. (If you can find a firearms trainer to also show them the basics of gun handling, you can control which characters seem like they would be familiar with firearms and which ones look completely clueless. Without that training, it's hard to control the level of competence the characters appear to have.)
Warning: Spoiler Ahead!
Finally, to finish with the film's conclusion, I found this ending to be very confusing. The home invasion situation was wrapped up very neatly, but then there were several scenes involving Russian and Italian gangsters in New Jersey. I thought there might be some sort of Boondock Saints-esque mob war about to erupt, but instead the whole thing ended very anti-climacticly. As the gun begins its journey with the West coast Russians, I can only assume that this ending sequence was supposed to be a tie-in of sorts, but, by that point, I had forgotten what the earlier Russians looked like, and wasn't able to make the connection. I almost wanted to see some sort of oddly ironic ending involving a kid or a dog unearthing the gun on a beach or back alley somewhere, thus starting the cycle all over again.
In keeping with the dramatic feel of this movie, a large portion of it was shot at night. Though its always challenging to shoot at night, Changing Hands' nighttime scenes looked great. The aforementioned robbery and murder of a henchman on a shipping yard had perfect eerie overhead lighting and harsh, dramatic shadows. The scene ended with a great overhead shot of the dead henchman lying in a pool of blood. Earlier in the film there were several aerial nighttime shots of the city, all of which looked perfect. They were followed by two Russian gangsters at a shipyard, framed with a beautifully lit crane in the background. The only nighttime shot that looked out of place was one of the security guard outside a firing range; the contrast was way too low, giving the scene a muddied, gray appearance. If insufficient light was used to acquire the image originally, it can be very difficult to get a high contrast image that doesn't fall apart in post.
From a white balance perspective, a couple other scenes also looked a bit off color. The most obvious one was inside the fence's warehouse, which had an odd yellowish tint to it—which seemed to be an error, rather than an intentional color-grading choice (such as those made in Trafffic). That scene was also lit brightly, but had some very odd-looking harsh shadows, as though the lighting had been hastily set up and not properly diffused or re-directed to use as fill light. If the scene was lit darker, this lighting might have matched better, but the bright lighting just made it look awkward. Another scene looked a bit too orange. As such, going through and doing some more color correcting will help that. (Apple's Color is popular, although a number of our filmmakers swear by Red Giant's Colorista, which is available for all platforms.)
