BEFORE: It's funny, when I did my chain of Asian-themed movies, I saw a bunch of actors pop up again and again, often ones I didn't plan on, like Roger Yuan or Tsai Chin, I didn't even realize I'd scheduled two movies with Jason Scott Lee, it just sort of happened. But aren't there like a billion Chinese people in the world, and you've got to figure a certain percentage of them are actors and actresses? But I guess only a few are headliners. From what I can tell, I'm going to see the same thing happen again this week with American action films with Bruce Willis in them. I guess once you get a crew of people together to make a movie, you might as well keep them together for the next one, and the one after that, it's just easier.
So both Bruce Willis AND Frank Grillo carry over from "Cosmic Sin". Bruce will be here for the rest of the week, but it's the last of three films for Frank Grillo - but if I get around to the "Purge" movies in October, he could come back late in 2022. We'll have to wait and see.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Marauders" (Movie #3,990)
THE PLOT: A bank manager haunted by a violent heist that took the life of a co-worker teams up with his ex-cop neighbor to bring down the assailant, initiating an explosive counter-attack that brings all three men to the breaking point.
AFTER: This film ended up sharing a lot with "Marauders", besides Bruce Willis, Johnathon Schaech and about five other actors. (Christopher Meloni is notoriously absent here, though, which is a shame.). Both films are about bank robbers operating in Cincinnati, and using new-fangled technology to do that.
Oh, there are differences, for sure - in "Marauders", Bruce Willis played the bank manager, and this time he plays the ex-cop neighbor who gives advice to the bank manager. And this time he's a hero character, for sure, I think there was something very shady about him in "Marauders", to suggest that maybe his banks needed to get robbed. "Marauders" was made first, released in 2016, and "Reprisal" came along two years later, which seems a bit odd because its story is much simpler, more cut-and-dry, you'd think that the film with the more twists to the plot, more secrets to reveal, would be more recent. Now, how they got so many actors to agree to come back to Cincinnati a second time, I have no idea.
Here there's not much mystery over the identity of the masked bank robber, and in "Marauders" there were several possibilities regarding who was the mastermind behind it all - it could even have been the bank manager robbing his own banks, I guess for the insurance money. Nah, that doesn't even make sense, but I did consider it as a possibility. "Reprisal", by comparison, maybe tips its hand too soon, we see the robber from the get-go, calling in bomb threats all over town, so the cops will be too busy to respond to the bank emergency. Makes sense, I'm on board so far.
After the robbery, the bank manager takes to drinking and sleeping late, so the bank fires him. Or maybe it was the other way around, the bank fired him so he started drinking early and sleeping late, I'm not sure. Either way, he's suddenly got a lot of time on his hands to play armchair detective, and with the help of his ex-cop neighbor, try to figure out where and when the robber will strike again. This guy's a pro, he picks banks with certain layouts that will give him quick escapes, then he trains in a warehouse that's decked out to look like the bank, and he goes through the scenario, again and again. He even puts the instructions for the bank staff on little index cards so he won't have to speak during the robbery. (Those guys in "Marauders" used a device programmed to issue orders, same general idea, only one is WAY cooler than the other...)
I guess this all makes some kind of sense, the ex-cop might not know WHO is robbing the banks, but he can learn HOW this guy is robbing the banks, and extrapolate from there. The guy's probably ex-military, he might know a thing or two about security systems, etc. The big NITPICK POINT here is that no matter isolated that warehouse is, there'd probably be somebody nearby who would hear all the gunshots during his training, and report that. He's not out in the woods, he's in a warehouse on the outskirts of Cincinnati, but that's still a populated area.
The ex-bank manager does manage to get one step ahead of the thief, and so he's in place to call it in to the cops, just like his neighbor showed him, and manages to thwart the robbery of an armored car. But unfortunately this leads me to NITPICK POINT #2, because he didn't disguise his face when he confronted the thief, so the thief probably got a good look at him. Remember how I said this guy trained and rehearsed the heist? He also did research about who worked at the bank, and he prominently had a photo of the bank manager posted up on his robbery "vision board", so why didn't he recognize the bank manager? He then had to ask around and kill a few people to learn his identity, so I guess either way we were going to end up in the same place, but honestly there was a much quicker way of getting there.
There are a number of other sloppy mistakes here, but that's the one that bothered me the most - and nobody was ever going to win an acting award for this, least of all the actresses playing the bank manager's wife and daughter. They're just there to be held as hostages later in the film, and the daughter's diabetic condition is just SO over-telegraphed at the start of the film that it's beyond ridiculous. The daughter appears to be a smart girl, why can't she understand how important it is to eat breakfast and maintain a blood-sugar level? The entire audience is just thinking, "Ah, this will probably be important later...", and that's why.
Anyway, it's just a bit odd that I could have used either THIS film or "Marauders" last December, to connect "Lucky Number Slevin" and "The Night Clerk". For my purposes, they're (more or less) interchangeable. "Marauders" also had Dave Bautista in it, and that MIGHT have made it easier for me to connect to "Dune" at the end of this month, but it doesn't matter much, I'm going to get there anyway - after the Bruce Willis films run out comes the Nicolas Cage chain, and then a run of Dave Bautista that's going to get me where I need to be. Still, I think that "Reprisal" deserves to be rated JUST a bit higher, because it's got more heart in the ending. Not more logical sense, just heart.
Also starring Johnathon Schaech (last seen in "The Night Clerk"), Olivia Culpo (last seen in "I Feel Pretty"), Natali Yura, Uncle Murda, Natalia Sophie Butler, Tyler Jon Olson (last seen in "Boss Level"), Wass Stevens (last seen in "The Family Man"), Colin Egglesfield (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Geoff Reeves, Shea Buckner (last seen in "Marauders"), Christopher Rob Bowen (ditto), Cameron Brexler (ditto), John Dauer (ditto), Martin Blencowe (ditto), Myles Jeffrey, Francesca Siena Tyberg, Ken Strunk (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Ashley Wisdom, Tamara Callie (last seen in "Vice" (2015)), Sergio Rizzuto, Lauren Shooshani, Joy Corrigan (last seen in "Aftermath"), Lauren Rhoden, David Yuzuk, Sarah Fultz, Craig Conover, Jennifer Titus.
RATING: 5 out of 10 exploding dye packs
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