The Bannen Way Review
The Bannen Way stars Mark Gantt—an industry veteran who has worked behind the scenes on over a hundred productions as well as created a dozen or so short films—as Neal Bannen, a small-time criminal trying to escape from his life of crime. Bannen’s “one last job” turns into more, however, when he loses the $150,000 he owes underworld boss Sonny Carr (Ski Carr) in a poker game and agrees to steal a mysterious box for his ruthless mobster uncle (Robert Forster) in order to get the money back. The assignment takes a turn for the worse when an attractive picket-pocket (Vanessa Marcil) seemingly double-crosses Bannen, the target of the theft (Michael Lerner) hires three female assassins to protect the box and Bannen’s police chief father (Michael Ironside) threatens his son with jail time.
Mark Gantt had a small acting role in the 2001 film Ocean’s Eleven, and The Bannen Way emulates both the style and sophistication of the George Clooney-starring classic. The webseries also offers an offbeat assortment of characters and a fair share of comic dialogue and situations to go along with the action and noir intrigue. The Bannen Way even owes debt to the works of Quentin Tarantino: the content of the mysterious box that no one can open brings to mind the briefcase from Pulp Fiction, while the three female assassins—named Jailbait (Autumn Reeser), Stiletto (Brittany Ishibashi) and Bombshell (Brianne Davis)—could easily fit amongst the cast of Kill Bill. Other elements inspire a comparison to live-action comic book adaptation, but in a good way. Where else, after all, would one find an underworld crime boss who breaks into Salsa dancing just as often as he shoots someone?
While most webseries are filmed on the cheap and feature a cast of relative unknowns, The Bannen Way was filmed with a high-end RED camera and is comprised of actors whose faces are instantly recognizable even if their names might not be. Robert Forster is a veteran actor who has appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown as well as the NBC drama Heroes. Michael Ironside, meanwhile, was in Top Gun and Total Recall, Vanessa Marcil is a Daytime Emmy Award-winning actress and even Autumn Reeser has appeared in both Entourage and The O.C.
“We decided to make webisodes, where potentially millions of people could see our work versus the forty or so people who would see our work at a film festival,” executive producer and star Mark Gantt told Mashable in April 2010 regarding how The Bannen Way came about. Along with co-creator Jesse Warren, the two also followed the tried-and-true industry route of pitching their project to various studios despite the independent nature of the endeavor. They no doubt benefited from The Bannen Way being a webseries—as opposed to television series or motion picture—because Sony was already searching for content to add to their online video venture Crackle and immediately seized the project. Having thus obtained funding, the next step was to call in the favors.
“We realized having names in the project was necessary to recoup the money,” Gantt explained to Mashable. “So a casting director with Sony helped us create a list of actors that would be good fits. We realized that one of our producers knew Robert Forest. Our agent at the time knew Vanessa Marcil and Michael Lerner. We went through Sony’s casting department and we pitched the show to them.”
Having a major studio like Sony involved—as well as a high-profile Internet release on Crackle—also offered the opportunity to explore a different type of business model than is usually used within the medium. While most webseries are simply made available online for free , Sony experimented with The Bannen Way by stringing the seven-minute individual episodes together into a feature-length motion picture. The longer format allows for the selling of the series into foreign markets as well as the potential for television broadcast in the United States and a more conventional DVD release. While such a model is no different from an actual motion picture or television series—which likewise follow a similar multi-platform path during their money-generating lifetime—The Bannen Way establishes that the webseries medium need not be limited to surviving on revenue generated through online advertising alone.
While The Bannen Way does indeed work as a full-length feature, it is still a webseries at heart with tight, concise episodes that further the story along and conclude with some form of cliff-hanger. In the end, Mark Gantt and Jesse Warren have constructed an entertaining story that not only pays homage to noir classics of the past but demonstrates that any genre can be tailor-made to fit the growing possibilities and potential of the World Wide Web while finding success in the process.
Anthony Letizia (April 26, 2010)
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