‘Ratchet’ Loses Grip on Promising Premise

On a plane to Nantucket, a passenger recognizes the man sitting across from him as Elliot Callahan, the writer-director of a mega-hit thriller--and innocently mentions the movie’s amazing similarity to a Hong Kong action picture. It’s a nifty piece of foreshadowing that helps deftly set up John S. Johnson’s “Ratchet,” a low-budget suspenser that takes off expertly only to lose momentum about halfway through its overly long 111 minutes.

Callahan (Tom Gilroy) hasn’t been able to follow up his box-office blockbuster and has headed to Nantucket to write his way out of a looming contractual obligation. When his muse fails to come to his rescue, he reaches into the wastebasket for a script by a local (Matthew Dixon) who had foisted it upon him. It turns out to have real potential to be a sex-and-violence hit, and Callahan is all set to do another bit of fortuitous plagiarizing.

Obviously, there are going to be complications or there wouldn’t be a movie, but after a highly assured buildup to what could have been an adroit and witty suspense film, Johnson piles on complications, adds a more-than-generous dollop of overly familiar anti-Hollywood sentiments and thereby makes us all too aware we’re watching a bunch of not only unsavory but also--much worse--uninteresting people. In any event, for the purposes of his plot, Johnson presents Nantucket as a hotbed of kinky, to the point of lethal, sex.

Gilroy, however, is solid, and so is the striking Margaret Welsh as a local real estate person. Neither she nor anyone else who turns up is remotely what they seem.

Johnson is a filmmaker worth remembering, but you wish he would have ratcheted up the suspense in “Ratchet.”

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes scenes of extreme sexual violence, some language.

‘Ratchet’

Tom Gilroy: Elliott Callahan

Margaret Welsh:Shep

Mitchell Lichtenstein: Tim Greenleaf

Murit Koppel: Julia Webb

A Phaedra Cinema release of a Ratchet production in association with Altar Rocks Films. Writer-director John S. Johnson. Producers George Belshaw, Johnson. Executive producer Hank Blumenthal. Cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay. Editors James Lyons, Keith Reamer. Costumes Jana Rosenblatt. Music Paul Schwartz. Production designer Debbie Devilla. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

*

* Exclusively at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9744; Warner Center, 6030 Canoga Ave., Woodland Hills, (818) 999-2130; and South Coast Plaza, 3410 S. Bristol St., Costa Mesa, (714) 546-2711.