The heavily stylized but mediocre to poorly written noir pastiche dialogue renders The American Side all but incomprehensible. I once watched an 11 minute noir short called Meridian. It has a loose narrative, but its only real purpose is to test the quality of video streaming and video codecs by doing a lot of the things that cause artifacting in digital video. The American Side feels like the narrative parts of Meridian blown out to feature length. Terrible, but perfunctorily so.
The people that made this low budget feature had enough juice to bring in Robert Forster, Robert Vaughn, Matthew Broderick, Janeane Garofalo and Harris Yulin, and while I'm sure they all got a solid payday, watching them try to…