Entertainment

Cost of a Soul

Two military veterans return home and immediately get sucked into the criminal underworld in the trite and overwrought melodrama “Cost of a Soul.”

Unknowns Chris Kerson and Will Blagrove play the vets, each of whom finds it impossible to stay away from gangsters in this amateur-hour production. Kerson plays a Marine who fled home to go off to war when his wife got pregnant, and now returns to the slums to find he has a crippled 6-year-old daughter. On the bright side, he also picks up a job — as a hit man.

Meanwhile, Blagrove plays DD, an Army sergeant whose big brother is a drug lord and whose little brother is getting seduced into the crime world. The film is the guy equivalent of daytime television — everyone’s a tough SOB with a sentimental side trying to live honorably in a dirty world. But surely, even in Philadelphia in this economy, there are jobs other than being a gangster.

Rookie director Sean Kirkpatrick keeps stomping on the drama pedal while blowing the cliché horn, yielding scene after tired scene of predictable developments as the principals keep shoving guns into mouths and screaming obscenities. People are so rude, maybe they should have called it “Meanie Streets.”