BEFORE: Bruce Willis carries over from "Lucky Number Slevin", and this presents me with something of a dilemma - I've realized how many films Bruce Willis has made in the last few years that have now found their way to the streaming platforms. After this one's gone, there are still SIX more on my list that I'm just not going to be able to get to, because I only have 10 slots left in 2021 after tonight, and I need all of those steps to reach my Christmas movies. Mr. Willis is totally dominating Netflix right now, just like Nic Cage is the boss on Hulu, but time is running out, I can't get to either group of films so close to Dec. 25. What to do? Sure, table them for next year, but when?
At the same time, I've been trying to put together my January line-up, and the chain has not presented itself yet, I've encountered resistance, as I mentioned a few days ago. Once I get three steps past January 1, there are just too many choices. I've got a potential starting point for January, and another potential starting point for February, but I have not been able to prove that there is a connection between those two points that is about 30 films long. I'll accept 29 or 31, or really, any number CLOSE to 30 at this point. (If the month runs short or long, I've got all next year to make up the difference...)
So my question then becomes, can I use one dilemma to help solve the other? Can I drop in six films with Bruce Willis in them and get any closer to bridging the big gap? I'll have to check this out after I watch "Marauders". With just ten films left to go this year, I'd be insane to change my line-up now, since I have a clear, solid, confirmed path to the end. Maybe January is the best time to watch the movies that couldn't fit into December? Is that what I usually do?
THE PLOT: When a bank is hit by a brutal heist, all evidence points to the owner and his high-powered clients. But as a group of FBI agents dig deeper into the case - and the deadly heists continue - it becomes clear that a larger conspiracy is at play.
AFTER: Another dilemma is that today's film shares FIVE actors with another Bruce Willis film, "Reprisal". So you know that it's killing me to NOT follow up this film with that one. But I think I have a very good reason. More on that in a bit.
This film starts off SO WELL - we the audience are thrown right into an exciting bank robbery, performed by a practiced team that's wearing masks and using advanced technology, crowd-control tactics and good old shotgun blasts very precisely, to do the maximum amount of financial damage to a bank in Cincinnati, and leave before the cops show up. It's impressive, but something's just a bit...OFF. Maybe it's in the way that their recorded message keeps repeating, "Follow our instructions, and you won't be harmed" just before they blow a security guard away, and they just didn't have to. So are they liars as well as thieves, or did something not go according to plan? We'll have to put in a pin in this little disconnect for now...
Cut to the CEO of the Cincinnati-based banking chain, played by Bruce Willis, and he seems very concerned about something. Is that stress, guilt or something else? He draws a very odd metaphor about a spider that's climbed the outside of his headquarters, all the way up to his floor. Either he's just an odd duck, or there's something going on under the surface. Once again, we'll have to put another pin here - but when the film returns to him later on, unfortunately we won't get any answers for a very long time.
The lead role here is played by Christopher Meloni, who's recently returned to the franchise that made him famous, "Law & Order" after like a 20-year absence, to play Detective Stabler once again. "Law & Order: Organized Crime" is great, and I approve of the change from one-episode plots to season-long overarching stories, it just works better, and allows him to really re-develop Stabler as a professional cop, an undercover agent, and a newly widowed father trying to balance everything while still taking down the bad guys. He often seems like he's in over his head, only he's really not, because he's smart and thorough and experienced - look, I don't know if this drama bears any resemblance to how real policemen work, but hey, I'm along for the ride. Meloni's been good in everything from "Oz" to "Happy" to "Wet Hot American Summer" and his role here as the lead FBI agent on the case suits him very well.
He's really the only non-suspect here, when it comes to answering "Who's dressing up like super-villains and robbing banks?" We know it's got to be SOMEBODY, because why else would the movie have masked characters? That means there's got to be an unmasking at some point, there's got to be a payoff, and my mind started working on that little problem right away. I'm not going to get there the same way, by following forensic evidence or criminal records of suspects or interrogating witnesses, I'm going to get there by knowing how movies work, because that's how I work a case.
Now, here's where I slipped up - the masked bank robbers made me think of Marvel villains like Taskmaster and Crossbones, they've got a sort of similar body armor-with-helmet look to them, and isn't that the guy who played Crossbones, Frank Grillo, playing Detective Mims? So he's the prime suspect, it makes sense to cast the guy who played Crossbones in this role - plus, he's never around when the bank robberies take place, so it could totally be him. He's got a wife with a cancer diagnosis, so maybe he needs money for her treatments, and this is how he supplements his police salary to pay for that. But then I thought, "No, wait, that's too obvious, maybe the movie WANTS me to think it's him, then the story's going to pull a fast one on me, it must be somebody else." There's only one problem with this line of reasoning, and that's the fact that Frank Grillo is NOT in this movie - Det. Mims is played by Johnathon Schaech. In my defense, if you Google photos of the two actors, you'll see they do look a lot alike. Still, mea culpa.
(ASIDE: Frank Grillo IS in two other action movies on my list, co-starring with Bruce Willis both times - "Cosmic Sin" and "Reprisal", the latter of which also features Johnathon Schaech in a role. So that's probably why I got them confused, beyond the fact that they resemble each other. If you look up the cast lists for action films like "First Kill", "Reprisal", "Escape Plan 2" and "Escape Plan 3", you'll see a ton of overlap. This usually makes my programming easier, but occasionally also harder.)
The FBI digs deeper into the case, but evidence starts leading them to a Gulf War soldier who's supposed to be dead, how could HE have a hand in the robbery? Other evidence, supplied by the robbers, seems to suggest that the bank's CEO is dirty somehow, and is storing blackmail material in his bank's safety deposit boxes, also possibly treating the bank's money as his own. Now, there are a few things wrong with this, so perhaps this is where the movie starts to run off the rails. I'm guessing that the chief executive of a whole banking CHAIN probably makes a decent annual salary. Maybe a few million a year? (I'm not an expert on these things, I'll admit.). And I'm guessing the job isn't all that difficult, once you reach that level in the business world you're probably set for life, you're fine as long as the entire U.S. economy doesn't collapse, which, to be fair, has been known to happen. Still, why would a well-paid CEO need to resort to blackmail or theft to make ends meet? And then even if his blackmail schemes are paying off, why would he need to skim money from his banks on top of that? Plus, don't we have some kind of federal monitoring of the banking system that would prevent exactly this sort of thing? Why isn't that system working? Are the auditors at the FDIC all asleep at the switch?
The bank-robbing crew donates some of their haul to a local charity, apparently they view themselves as a high-tech crew of "Robin Hoods", so this is really the same question that I saw posed a few nights ago by "Locked Down". If you steal a lot of money, and you donate, say, 1/3 of it (as that seems to be the standard movie rate) to charity, does that make the overall theft OK? I don't think so, but I think at least we're talking about sums of money that a screenwriter THINKS will present a dilemma here. But it just doesn't. Does it? About this time in the story, I turned to my BFF Andy (my houseguest for the weekend) and asked him whether he thought a charity would report unusual large cash donations to the detective at the local precinct. I very much doubted it, but Andy thought it might be possible. Either way, wouldn't there be some other method of bookkeeping that a charity would need to follow to report this donation? Again, I'd like to believe our society has a proper way of maintaining some order, but now I guess I have to concede that the head of the mission MIGHT have found a large cash donation a bit suspect, what with all the recent bank robberies in the Cincinnati area.
Andy and I then debated whether "Marauders" is a good movie, which is a lot tougher to determine. Like "Lucky Number Slevin" there are more questions than answers, and most of those answers aren't provided until the very end of the film. In the meantime they seem to have all the elements needed for a killer action movie - they've got Bruce Willis, Chris Meloni, Dave Bautista, plus the great (?) Cincinnati skyline, hi-tech gadgets, and somebody definitely rented a killer rain machine, which was used in as many scenes as possible. Thankfully, this also coincided with the two or three days that Bruce Willis was also available to play his role. (Come on, to be fair, the guy clearly had 6 other action movies to appear in that year, based on how many are currently available on Netflix...). There's also very obvious product placement, courtesy of a kick-ass GMC SUV that seats 6 comfortably and barely stands out AT ALL when the FBI is using it as a base of operations for surveillance during a funeral. Two of the characters also very prominently drink Bushmill's Black Bush whiskey, in different scenes, which either implies a connection between those two characters, or else it meant that the production's budget could only afford one bottle, and had to re-use it. (Any remainder was no doubt consumed at the wrap party...)
But the larger question is, do those pieces all come together, to create something that's more than the sum of its parts? Nah, not really. So much of this is very confusing, and then when the answers DO finally come, there's no explanation for why the FBI didn't have these answers sooner. That's what they DO, they look at the case files ("jackets") of all the people involved and they look for any possible connections, but here those connections all come either at the last minute or even later, commonly known as "too late" or "after the fact". Was everyone in the FBI just plain incompetent, or (more likely) did the screenwriter just not know how an FBI investigation works - in addition, of course, to not really knowing how banking or charitable donations work? I'm sort of spotting a recurring theme here.
The third item in the Trivia section on this film's IMDB page points out that this was writer Michael Cody's first film. Ah, yes, that explains a lot. Like how a movie with a budget of about $15 million only made $1.6 million at the box office.
Ah, but here's my bit of good news - and it hearkens back to Frank Grillo and Bruce Willis. Realizing that I can't fit the other Bruce Willis films into 2021, my next thought is, might I find room for them in January? And I'd only programmed January as far as "Spider-Man" and "Shang-Chi", maybe only through the first 8 days of 2022. From "Shang-Chi" I can see a path to a film called "Boss Level" with Frank Grillo in it, and as I said before, he's in two movies with Bruce Willis, so getting all those films in gets me to day 17, then I can link to seven films with Nicolas Cage, four with 50 Cent and six more with Dave Bautista. (As I mentioned before, there's a TON of overlap if I stay within the action-film genre...). Dave Bautista's also in the new "Dune" film, which happens to link to the first film in my romance chain! So I turned my regret over not being able to watch more Bruce Willis movies into a possible solution for January! And if I can get from January 1 to February 1, then I've really got like the first quarter of 2022 programmed, or at least until about March 15. What a relief! Of course, it's not set in stone, I could change it, but it's great to know there's at least one path that will get me through the first couple of months - and my choice for the first film of the year is now confirmed as a solid one.
Also starring Christopher Meloni (last seen in "Almost Friends"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Stuber"), Adrian Grenier (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented"), Texas Battle, Johnathon Schaech (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Lydia Hull (last seen in "Broken City"), Tyler Jon Olson (last seen in "Heist"), Christopher Rob Bowen (ditto), Danny A. Abeckaser (last seen in "The Irishman"), Richie Chance, Tara Holt (last seen in "The Prince"), Carolyn Alise, Chris Hill, Jesse Pruett (last seen in "Vice" (2015)), David Gordon (ditto), Cameron Brexler (ditto), Alyshia Ochse (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Ryan O'Nan (last seen in "Eat Pray Love"), Rico Simonini (last seen in "A Good Day to Die Hard"), Michael Urriquia, Torrie Wilson, Shea Buckner, Kristen Rae Myers, Joe Gelchion, John Dauer, Alora Catherine Smith, Derek DuChesne, Chick Bernhard (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life").
RATING: 4 out of 10 glasses of wine (undrunk)
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