THE FIVE RULES OF SUCCESS STANDS TALL

There was quite the buzz about this film during the opening weekend of the Fantasia Film Festival and we can see we why after it made its virtual live screening.  The Five Rules of Success focuses on a convict whose name is X, played by Santiago Segura, is let out on parole.  Directed by Orson Oblowitz, the film is a far cry from his home invasion film Tresspass (Hell is Where the Home Is) back in 2011 so The Five Rules of Success serves as a fresh new slate for the director.  Oblowitz puts all the camerawork and emphasis on X and has the audience engaged with who he is and what we think he has gone through in the opening stanza of the film.  The audience then gathers that he is let go into the streets of Los Angeles to fend for himself, look for a place, a job, report to his parole officer and to make sure that he does not go back to prison by all means necessary.  Sound difficult?  It shouldn’t be as he motivates himself throughout the film by stating the rules of success one by one into his voice recorder.

X then becomes his own influencer as he takes everything in stride and lands a job first in a restaurant headed by a man Avakian, played by Jon Sklaroff, who ends up being one of X’s mentors.  Following rule after rule in his parole tenure, X starts to move up in the world even though by this time he has hadplenty of time to screw things up and throw it down the drain.  His parole officer Emma, played by Isidora Goreshter, has no hesitation of putting X back in jail even if its one drop of alcohol or any hit of a drug.  X then meets Danny, played by Jonathan Howard, who is his boss’ son.   Danny tries to loosen up the ever so tight and intense X by showing him around LA and convince him to have a smoke and drink and even tries to get him a blow job or two at the local karaoke peeler.  The audience can tell at this point that X is on a mission to fulfill his goals and follow a straight and narrow path to become successful but as he starts going up his list of rules of success, things start to get more intense, challenging and chaotic for X.

As Avakian starts to give more responsibility to X he also wants him to keep an eye on his son whom he knows that in a lot of criminal activity.  This becomes a struggle for X as he gets deeper into his rules of success because the activities that Danny gets himself into are the ones that may land X back in jail.  Things start to heat up in the city of Angels as things become less of a challenge as he yearns to have that much more in life.  He is basically hungry like the wolf.  X starts to look for more opportunities as his bigger dream of owning a restaurant lands in his face.  All of a sudden all of those chances that were not in his first desired pathway is starting to look sweeter rather than sour.  As he says to his boss in a Donnie Brasco type of fashion that they both have a different perspective on time and for X, his time is now.

Santiago Segura in The Five Rules of Success

Director Orson Oblowitz shows the reality of being a convict and what it is like to start all over again with nothing in the cards you have been dealt with.  The stigma that one must face once getting out of jail and have any person pull a 180 degree and turn on you because you are a convict in an instant is quite intense and overwhelming, to say the least.   Nonetheless, this is the reality that X must face who has absolutely no idea of what life is like in the underbelly of LA after being imprisoned when he was a child.  Oblowitz shows you an illegal alien of a different kind where it is one from the prisons rather than south of the border.  Oblowitz follows suit of the temperature of the film and the city of LA similar to the films that Danny Trejo stars in and or Michael Mann’s Heat or Collateral where every sequence is hot and intense.  As they say, either you are going to get the world or the world is going to get you:  it’s that simple in Tupac theory.

The audience tends to fall for the anti-hero X in The Five Rules of Success because we love the effort that he is putting into his life and for his future.  Yet we get behind his naivety and his straight course of action in a messy chaotic city of Los Angeles in hopes that he will fulfill his dream.  But we all know even since Shakespearean times that wherever X ends up that there is going to be a tragedy.  LA is just too much for an inexperienced guy like X to handle.  X will never rise to the levels of maybe a Scarface or a Donnie Brasco but the saying remains for true for most whether you are in jail or not is that no one wants to see you succeed. Nobody.