A charming, romantic comedy with a touch of darkness at its edges, Reluctant Angel has a smart script that keeps surprising revelations up its sleeve and doles them out in just the right doses at just the right moments. Cheryl (Megan Follows) and Jason (James Gallenders) are small-time grifters. Jason dresses up like a valet to steal fine cars and the two of them pull little scams in order to skin a few bucks from corner store cash registers. But Cheryl becomes annoyed when Jason, out of sheer boredem, keeps raising the stakes. 

Everything changes the night she mistakenly thinks she slammed the get-away car into a drunk and almost killed him. But Donald (Jaimz Woolvert), a kind of philosopher-naif with a heart of gold and an intense self-destructive streak, thinks she's actually saved his life.  

Follows plays Cheryl with a gauche sort of glee, while Gallanders is charismatic as the smooth-talking two-bit hustler with good breeding. Woolvert, who played the jittery wannabee outlaw kid in Unforgiven, gives the oddball Donald a nervous fragility that cloaks a solid moral core. Reluctant Angel manges to to be both sweet and sour, tempering its sentimentality with sharp humour and the murky sadness at the heart of each member of its love triangle. 

John Dippong