In the mid-90s, the director Donald Cammell disowned his final film Wild Side after producers at Nu Image recut it as an embarrassingly sleazy lesbian erotic thriller. After the director’s death, the screenwriter China Kong and the editor Frank Mazzola reconstructed Cammell’s original vision and the result was a revelation – a film that bore little or no relation to the producers’ bastardised incarnation. The same may (or may not?) be true of the Jamaican-American writer-director Gee Malik Linton’s debut feature Daughter of God, which surfaces here in a shambolic Lionsgate-approved version under the new title Exposed, with directorial chores now pseudonymously credited to “Declan Dale”.
Originally envisaged as a surreal, bilingual sociopolitical drama centring on a Latina woman (Ana de Armas) who believes that she’s been visited by angels, this somehow emerges as a Keanu Reeves cop thriller in which a New York detective bumbles around searching for the killer of his partner, whose wife (Mira Sorvino) has got the hots for him. With added space aliens. Really. Incomprehensibly disjointed and stunningly dull, this edit has been accused of “whitewashing” Linton’s movie, cutting back the black and Latino characters who originally lay at its core to put its white stars centre stage. Safe to say it’s impossible to pass judgment on Linton’s vision on the evidence of this celluloid car crash, which the director has duly disowned, and which you should avoid.
