BEFORE: Bruce Willis carries over from "Extraction". I forgot to mention yesterday that when I signed on to Netflix yesterday to watch "Extraction", that was the first film that was being recommended to me, so it appears that the Netflix matrix has FINALLY started to figure me out. That only took about five years. Now if Amazon also starts recommending to me the next movie that I was intending to watch, I'm going to get really worried. The Matrix is somehow listening in...
THE PLOT: After his family is kidnapped during their sailing trip in Spain, a young Wall Street trader is confronted by the people responsible: intelligence agents looking to recover a mysterious briefcase.
AFTER: There seems to be a lot of hate out there directed at this film, or at least an intense amount of dislike, it's only got a 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is still 4 points higher than "Hard Kill". But I don't think it's THAT bad, so I'd like to know what people don't like about it. It could be that the hero is very clueless about what to do to save his family for most of the movie, I mean, he finally gets it together near the end, but it's a long, tough road. But if somebody were NOT an intelligence expert, if they were just a regular guy (albeit a really beefy, CUT one) they might make a similar amount of mistakes and goof-ups. Particularly I'm thinking of the sequence when Cavill's character decides to go UP in a building where the bad guys are chasing him, and he just didn't have a plan for what to do when he got to the roof.
He lowers his female helper/partner down with a cable of some kind, but then gets shot at and drops the cable, so she ends up in freefall, then he grabs the cable again to slow her fall, somehow doesn't lose all the skin from his hands due to cable-burn, and her descent is stopped so suddenly that the stop should have caused her some internal damage, considering where the cable is wrapped around her mid-section. Then he ties a similar cable around his own waist and jumps off the building, which is another terrible idea because that's NOT a bungee cord, it's just a regular one, and he misses the building on the other side of the street, then proceeds to hit EVERY balcony on the way down before hitting the street. It's never the fall that kills somebody, remember, it's that sudden STOP at the end. But many films make this mistake, even "Boss Level" believed that if a guy jumped out of a five-story window, he'd die if he hit the street, but he'd survive if he landed on top of a truck. Umm, no, the truck top is only about 12 feet off the ground, so all he did was turn a five-story fall into a four-story fall, with an equally hard surface at the end, he'd be just as dead, the only difference would be that if he landed on the truck, he wouldn't ALSO get run over. But still, dead.
Again, this guy's no James Bond or Jason Bourne, just a regular guy whose family gets kidnapped while he's off the sailboat, making a phone call and buying snacks. He gets back to find the boat has been moved, and his father, mother, brother and sister-in-law are gone. He goes straight to the Spanish police, but this only puts him in contact with corrupt cops who take him to the person claiming responsibility for the kidnapping. Our hero, Will, is very confused, and maybe that's part of the problem, he spends so much of the movie not knowing which end is up or who to trust that we the audience don't know either, and we just don't like that feeling. We need to be told who's in the white hats and who's in the black hats, and we don't like much ambiguity on this front. A little bit is OK, but not a lot, because then we'd have to stop and think about U.S. agencies like the CIA and black ops and whether they're out there doing good in the world, but come on, probably not.
Will is contacted by his father, though, who got away from the kidnappers and reveals to his son that he's worked for the "agency" for many years - and here they thought he was an advisor to the U.S. government, they didn't know he was out there running missions and such. My first guess was that the kidnappers targeted Will's family because he worked for a bank or something, and he could easily get ransom money sent to them, but no, it's not that simple. The terrorists (or whoever) were targeting the family of Will's father, so I guess either he's a really great secret agent (with the emphasis on "secret") or something else is going on. But what?
Ah, there's a secret briefcase that was part of a handoff in a mission that took place before this film started, and somebody wants that briefcase - whatever it is, it's like the third or fourth MacGuffin this week, so if the other films this week are any indication, it's probably a mobile device that will scramble some other country's communications and enable somebody to then take over the world somehow. Or something, does it really matter, as long as the movie gets a couple of good car chases out of the deal?
So what don't people like about this, besides the fact that once Will gets a gun, he shoots hundreds of bullets at the bad guys and never reloads? (That is somewhat standard in action films, sorry to say...). Ah, the product placement - when he drinks a Coke from a vending machine early in the film, the brand name is prominently displayed because he holds the can just so. And all of the cars in the car chase have their Range Rover lettering prominently in every shot. Was that the problem? Or was there just not enough character development for Cavill's character, or did he not display enough emotion? I thought he was great as Superman, but that character can tend to be very stoic. Some people apparently just didn't know what "The Cold Light of Day" means, and reflected that in their score, either way, the movie bombed at the box office, so for whatever reason, people weren't feelin' it.
I was sort of half feelin' it, so therefore my score is half of what it could be. Makes sense? And it still might end up tying for best Bruce Willis film this week, that's the sort of dire straits I'm in right now.
Also starring Henry Cavill (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Sigourney Weaver (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Veronica Echegui, Caroline Goodall (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Rafi Gavron (last seen in "A Star Is Born" (2018)), Joseph Mawle (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Oscar Jaenada (last seen in "The Limits of Control"), Lolo Herrero, Mark Ullod, Emma Hamilton, Michael Budd (last seen in "The Matrix Reloaded"), Joe Dixon, Alex Amaral, Jim Piddock (last seen in "Mascots"), Fermi Reixach, Simon Andreu (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Morgan Johnson, Paloma Bloyd (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Roschdy Zem, Colm Meaney (last seen in "Tolkien").
RATING: 5 out of 10 nightclub bouncers with tasers
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