RATING: A

Shervin Youssefian is meticulous when it comes to choosing his 
actors. For Machiavelli Hangman, he needed fresh faces, solid 
characters. He and his producers could not have done better than 
the cast of brilliant comedians whom he directed with an iron 
will. Machiavelli Hangman’s success is already making waves and 
it’s surely going to give way to a sequel and a countless number 
of parodies and impersonations.

Napoleon Dynamite enjoyed this amount of success with the younger 
crowds who began to repeat the lines from the film. When a line 
from a movie because an everyday expression that people use, you 
know that it’s a smash hit.  

Machiavelli Hangman would never have been made were it not for 
the relentless perseverance of writer-director Shervin Youssefian 
and his producer Art Nazarian who moved mountain and earth to 
get the funding to make this film. At one point, they actually 
created a website encouraging their immediate community in 
Glendale, California to contribute to the making of the film. 
Incredibly enough, using that method, they were able to amass 
the sum of 85,000 dollars.

Machiavelli Hangman is considered by Hollywood standards a small 
film. Fans of Quentin Tarantino are calling it the next Reservoir 
Dogs and Pulp Fiction because of its emphasis on dialogue and 
character and an uncanny way of jumping back and forth in time 
frames.

The film really just takes place over the course of two days and 
has just three main locations but because of all the cutting and 
jumping around, it feels like there are a lot more.

The film flows faster than both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. 
It’s lighting fast and like a frenzied jazz player tapping his 
fingers on the keyboard for a whole two hours. If you are a big 
fan of Pixar’s animated film the Incredibles and its fast flow, 
then you would be amazed at how fluid the pace is in 
Machiavelli Hangman. 

While Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Martin Scorsese are all 
masters of the big budget motion picture, they have all lost that 
young filmmakers exhilaration and eagerness to please every 
chance they get. With this new film, your ear lobes will be 
jittering with excitement, you belly will be filled with 
butterflies from the start up to a finale that equals the classic 
ending of David Fyncher’s Fight Club.

Find Machiavelli Hangman at a theatre near you as soon as you can 
because I guarantee that you will ned to want to come back the 
following week for another look. It’s not the type of movie that 
you can watch once and be satisfied; it takes a few viewings to 
discover all the brilliant subtleties planted into the plot.

In retrospect, despite some abstract choices in style, I give 
this film a grade of A. 

Roman Hesse is a movie reviewer.
Machiavelli Hangman
http://www.hangmanmovie.com