Eric Silvera and Sean Kenealy have a nice rapport. Which is a good thing, since it’s just about the only quality they can offer in their feature debut “In Action.” Meant to be a kind of takeoff of action film tropes, it is ultimately hogtied by its extreme budgetary and casting restraints.
Almost as a dare, they are the only ones who appear in what they proudly proclaim is “The World’s First Two-Person Action Movie.” Even when they’re fighting shadowy enemies, we never see their foes, their wives or even the rats we hear squeaking at their feet.
Shot on a budget about equal to a new Toyota — a Kickstarter campaign raised $22,730 from 300 backers — they used just two locations. It started to look like an empty-stage one man theater show after a while. Except there were two of them. Bantering back and forth all the time.
There is an idea at the center of all this. Silvera and Kinealy play a couple of former writer partners who bitterly split five years earlier. They meet again at the wedding of the least talented member of their screenwriting class who nonetheless scored a number of big hits (Needless to say we never see that dude either).
Each one has a different life by now — one is a New York City ad man, the other a stay at home dad in Virginia — so they agree to rekindle their writing efforts via email. Eventually they hit upon a story involving terrorist attack at the wedding of the President’s daughter, since a similar event was in the news.