BEFORE: Bruce Willis carries over from "Acts of Violence", this is film #8 in a row for him, just one more to go after this, then I'm all caught up. Nah, not really, he's just made too many films in the last few years for me to ever get all caught up.
THE PLOT: A group of friends become involved in a potentially deadly diamond heist.
AFTER: First off, I need clarification on the title of this film - Wikipedia and the IMDB list is as "Setup", but the cable company apparently didn't get the memo, and displays it as "Set Up". There's a fair amount of difference there, one's a noun and the other is a phrase used as an adjective - now me, I would have put a hyphen in-between the words, but that's just because I love hyphens so much.
Well, I started the Bruce Willis chain with cosmic interstellar genocide, but then spent two days on bank heists, two days on mercenaries defending world-takeover tech, and two days on kidnapping. Actually there was some overlap, the mercenary films had a little kidnapping in them, so did one of the bank heist films. And through it all, Bruce Willis has played a general with the Space Force, an ex-cop, a dirty sheriff, a tech company CEO, a secret agent, a secret secret agent, and an honest current cop. So versatile! Tonight he's a mob boss, if you can believe that one. Is there any role that he can't play, besides the ones that require spending more than one day on a film shoot?
The real star here is Curtis Jackson, or "50 Cent" or "Fifty" or "Fiddy" or maybe he's just calling himself "Dy" these days, I can't keep up. I think that the IMDB, however, should have started limiting the number of name changes that any one person gets, right after Sean "Puffy" Combs changed his name to Puff Daddy, then to P. Diddy, then Diddy, and Kanye is now "Ye" on the IMDB, which is just ridiculous. We all KNOW his name is Kanye West, so shouldn't his name on the IMDB reflect the name that everybody knows? Look at the poster above, it clearly says "Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson", so that's the name I"m going to use. I've been through this with Kid Cudi and Kid 'N Play and the ladies from TLC, and I've got to draw that line somewhere. This isn't like the Asian actors who get their given and family names put backwards by the Hollywood system, this is just about rappers getting swollen egos and being indulged and allowed to change their names to whatever they want. Well, fine, if Kanye gets to change his name to "Ye" then I still have the right to call him Kanye West, which I will continue to do, at least until I receive an injunction by post.
(Really, it cuts both ways, you can't get a producing credit as "Curtis Jackson" and an acting credit as "50 Cent" in the SAME film. You've got to pick one.). Anyway, once the Bruce Willis chain ends, Mr. Jackson's going to be sticking around here for a few days.
50 Cent plays Sonny, the titular guy who's "set up" by his friends in a "set-up" and has to set things up, er, straight again somehow. He and two childhood friends pull off a diamond heist, and then one friend shoots the other two. But somehow this guy didn't get the memo that you can't kill 50 Cent with a bullet, I think he's been shot before in real life and he MAY have mentioned this fact before in interviews. Silly backstabbing, er, chest-shooting friend. Sonny gets up and walks it off (eventually) and figures out a way to get back at his friend, Vincent. To do this, he robs a poker game and works his way up the chain to get a sit-down with the biggest mob boss in Detroit, Biggs.
The mob boss agrees to help him get his share from the heist, provided he does a few favors first. I think there was an episode of "M*A*S*H" like this, where Hawkeye and BJ had to do a favor chain for everybody in camp, just to get a three-day pass to Tokyo or something. (EDIT: This long-running show actually did TWO episodes with favor chains, one in season 2 where Hawkeye was trying to get a new pair of boots, and another in season 4 where the goal was to get another can of tomato juice for Col. Potter. If you're too young to remember "M*A*S*H", I'm sure it's streaming somewhere... It was syndicated at least twice a day in my parents' house). In order to get his share of the diamond heist, Sonny has to boost $2 million that a rival gang is digging up, and deliver it back to Biggs. Which he looked like he might do, except then the film has one of those "Whoops, I just shot Marvin in the face!" moments, a la "Pulp Fiction".
Sonny also tracks down the guy who fenced the diamonds, and tries getting his cut that way. Yeah, that's a no-go, too, because the fence already paid Vincent and says Sonny's got to work things out with him. Considering that Vincent already SHOT him once, that's probably a bad idea, and it only gets the fence killed, too. Meanwhile, there's another hitman, representing the party that SHOULD have received the diamonds, and he's willing to kill Sonny, Vincent, or anybody else that gets in his way. Also meanwhile, Vincent's father is in prison, and we learn that the warden is offering Vincent's father protection, and extorting money from Vincent, which is why he had to pull the double-cross set-up in the first place. So yeah, it's a little hard to find somebody to root for here, everybody's dishonest, and then even the honest one learns to be dishonest, just to survive all this.
Sonny puts the $2 million in a locker and tells Biggs that Vincent took it and killed Bigg's man, who was acting as Sonny's partner. Usually this would be a VERY BAD idea, to steal a mobster's money and put the blame on somebody else. But it does seem to be a way here to accomplish a few things at once, like, why kill two birds with one stone when you can kill three? Still, I'm not sure this sends out a very constructive message to the audience, and this plan has so many moving parts that if even ONE thing doesn't go the right way, it could be fatal. Which it is, for some people, the audience is just clearly being conditioned to accept that if the worse bad people die, that's fine and if the slightly better bad people don't, that's the best we can hope for, I guess. Hey, life is complicated in Detroit, especially when there are so many overlapping crimes going on at once.
So much was still unresolved at the end of the film that it almost feels like somebody was planning a sequel - thankfully this hasn't happened, so far.
Also starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Ryan Phillippe (last seen in "I Know What You Did Last Summer"), Jenna Dewan, Randy Couture (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), James Remar (last seen in "Horns"), Brett Granstaff (last seen in "Vice" (2015)), Will Yun Lee (last heard in "Superman: Unbound"), Shaun Toub (last seen in "War Dogs"), Susie Abromeit (last seen in "Battle Los Angeles"), Rory Markham (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Jay Karnes, Ron Turner, Ralph Lister (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Alex Safi, Ambyr Childers (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Omar Dorsey (last seen in "Harriet"), Rich Komenich (last seen in "The Watcher"), D.J. Howard, Richard Franklin, Richard Goteri, Jordan Trovillion.
RATING: 4 out of 10 prison shanks
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