Rowena Hoseason's Reviews > Nobody Move

A rollicking rampage of wise guys, sassy strippers, hard-boiled detectives and cold-blooded killers, Nobody Move easily adds up to near-perfect pulp fiction.

Eddie’s story is a freight-train of good intentions which get shunted onto the fast track to hell. He’s not an altogether bad bloke (for a mob enforcer who collects debts with menaces and spends all his spare time in strip joints), but his lazy complicity has led him a long way into iniquity. You don’t end up murdering a couple of swells entirely by accident.
Eddie’s chaotic bank-robbing colleagues are disloyal liars. Sadistic crime boss Saul is brutally bad to the bone. Diego the hitman comes with zero conscience and no compunction about killing absolutely, positively every sucker in the room.
Only Dakota – a young woman seeking the truth about her missing friend – and LAPD detective Alison Lockley are unambiguously on the side of the angels. And both of these women aren’t above bending the rules to suit their righteous purposes.

Author Philip Elliott throws absolutely everything into the mix and saturates his snappy dialogue in so many musical and cinematic references that the pages almost shake from the soundtrack pounding. At times Nobody Move reads just like a screenplay and there’s no escaping the comparisons to Tarantino or the Coen brothers.
I could’ve done without the long lecture on the plight of Native American young women or the strident outbursts about calculated chauvinism. These long-winded detours sat uncomfortably alongside the pell-mell pace of the galloping narrative.

Combining heartfelt moral commentary with black humour, a rising body count and frantic action is a tricky balancing act: let’s hope Elliott has plenty of opportunity in future to perfect that skill.
A flickering neon nugget of first class neo-noir.
9/10

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