“Skip Trace 2” is both a good movie and a pleasing anagrammatical alternative to the horrifying “Rape 2 Ticks”

Jesse Jane and Riley Steele in "Skip Trace 2" — Jesse Jane and Riley Steele in “Skip Trace 2”

Cleavage popping, areolas showing, tiny-being, Jesse Jane and Riley Steele are as unconvincing as skip tracers as they were as firefighters, but who cares? Fugitive drug kingpin Nacho Vidal drops two giddily violent sex scenes with Charley Chase and Jynx Maze into “Skip Trace 2,” a pared-down but quality Digital Playground venture.

Studio: Digital Playground
Director: Robby D.
Starring: Jesse Jane, Riley Steele, Nacho Vidal, Charley Chase, Jynx Maze, Keiran Lee, Tommy Gunn

Jesse and Riley, as has become DP’s naming convention in its scripted fare, play Jesse and Riley, two otherwise red-blooded American girls who double as badass skip tracers (but don’t worry, they’re really goodass). Hooked up with bumbling Brit law enforcement dude Keiran Lee, Riley and Jesse are tasked with finding feared trace skipper Nacho Vidal.

Writer/director Robby D. makes the most of little bits of business, like looks between Riley and Jesse, packing an admirable amount of subtext and exposition into a few well-chosen interludes. This is a sequel, after all, and we learn in an economical way that Jesse was once romantically involved with boss Tommy Gunn (who works in a stock-footage Library Tower, L.A.’s tallest building).

Gunn is the film’s one indulgence. Apparently he must have played a bigger part in the original, but here he is a non-sex expository character. Poor bastard.

Jesse and Riley eventually get their man after some running around, and Keiran Lee is consoled out of his haplessness by the both of them in separate scenes. Jesse also has a tender moment with doctor boyfriend Manuel Ferrara.

“You did this dancing?” Ferrara asks, examining a skip trace injury.

“You could say that,” says Jesse.

“I did just say that.”

These three scenes will please Jesse Jane and Riley Steele fans, but it is Nacho’s scenes with Chase and Maze that seemed to be from a different movie altogether, and which make “Skip Trace 2” a memorable film (even if Vidal’s scenes can be neatly lifted out and compiled elsewhere and independent of the movie).

Chase plays the coke-mad sister of Jynx Maze, and in the movie’s first and best sex scene Chase shows Nacho what she’ll do for a bag of his yayo. At no point does the viewer think that Chase can’t take what Vidal is dishing out, but at the same time we just don’t expect this extreme gonzo performance from a Digital Playground movie.

“You gonna fuck me like you fuck my sister?” says coke-fiend Chase to Vidal.

“No,” he growls. “Worse.”

Vidal slaps her with both his hands and with a bag of cocaine, face fucks her, throws her to the couch several times, sticks a rag in her mouth, his feet on her neck, and lifts Chase by her hair. At the end she is a triumphant, sweaty mass, and looks great. Later, a topless Chase brandishes a baseball bat and menaces Keiran Lee. Chase is great in this movie.

Vidal’s scene with Jynx Maze is almost as violent, and Maze similarly survives Nacho.

Perhaps because it’s a sequel, or because it’s not a “big” movie, “Skip Trace 2” is a quality effort but unremarkable save for Vidal’s two scenes, which would not have been as intense with a different trio of actors.

This is the first Digital Playground movie I’ve seen since the company was assimilated into the Manwin family of porn ventures last year. While there is no cost-cutting evident in terms of Robby D.’s capable style, it was notable that the porn-standard five sex scenes were pulled off by seven people, rather than ten or more.