Acts of Violence

Year 14, Day 22 - 1/22/22 - Movie #4,023

BEFORE: You may have heard of S.A.D., or Seasonal Affective Disorder, it's a form of depression that takes place during winter, the cold, dark days that make you feel that life is hopeless and it's never going to get better.  I've had something akin to that this week, only it's brought on by too many schlocky action movies with Bruce Willis in them.  If I were really enjoying them, I'd call this week BruceDance or BrunoDance, because I know the Sundance Film Festival just started a couple days ago, but as it is, I just want the week to be over.  The good news is that I'm already six films in, so it's 2/3 over and there are just two films to go. Yep, I programmed this 9-film sub-chain, and it started with just "The Cold Light of Day" and tomorrow's film from cable, and look what it turned into.  

I thought maybe I'd have to spend $3.99 to watch this one on iTunes, but then I found out that's streaming FREE on Pluto TV.  Yeah, that's probably not a good thing, because the best movies are the ones you have to pay for. 

THE PLOT: At a bachelorette party in a Cleveland nightclub, the bride tells two guys offering drugs to go away. They abduct her, and the groom's two big brothers who looked after him as kids do so again as veterans, looking for her and the kidnappers. 

AFTER: In addition to my main watchlist, and the other list of films I'd like to add to my watchlist, and the list of the films I've seen, I've got another list, of the films I've seen but don't have physical copies of, and it's a long, slow process, but if cable TV runs a movie that's on that last list, I'll dub it to DVD and cross it off the list.  You know, in case I get a sudden urge to watch THAT movie, out of the thousands that I own, and it's not available at that moment on cable or any streaming service.  Umm, this never really happens, but I'm prepared for it should the need arise. Now, on that list is a film called "The Young Poisoner's Handbook", which I haven't thought about in a long while - there's no point, because no cable channel ever runs this movie, I saw it a Sundance years ago and I haven't seen it since.  I'm only thinking about it now, because I happened to glance at that list of films that I may never see again, or have a copy of in any format. (Seriously, it's not even on iTunes, and nearly everything is there... It looks like it was on Tubi at some point, but no longer. Where do films go when they die?)

The film's based on a true story about a British teenager who was very intelligent in the ways of chemistry, but completely amoral, and he managed to poison his friends, family and co-workers.  Yeah, it's not a happy film, and that may be why it's unavailable, nobody's going to seek it out and watch it, because mostly people want to have a good time and enjoy movies and not think about whether their friends or family members are secretly trying to kill them with poison.  I think something like this is part of the problem with "Acts of Violence", and why it's available on Pluto TV for free, who is going to pay good money, even $2 or $3, to watch a movie that's a feel-bad film - that's the opposite of a feel-good film, obviously.  

To some extent, we watch movies to fool ourselves, to forget for a couple hours about the entropy of the universe, how we're all going to die someday, that everything, our jobs and our relationships, has an expiration date, and the clock is always ticking. But you figure you can probably get through the next 90 to 100 minutes once you start a movie, and for a short time at least, everything's going to be OK. So now I'm scratching my head whenever I encounter a movie that works the other way, it doesn't help us out by giving us a happy ending or a resolution or what our lizard brain wants to just feel something close to OK for a couple hours.  And this brings me back to "Acts of Violence" - why not just give the audience what they want, what they need, would that be so wrong?  

This film starts with a war veteran, from Iraq or Afghanistan no doubt, feeling underserved by his point of contact at the V.A.  This is topical, great start, but we also get some attitude from this veteran guy, because even though the guy at the V.A. is trying to help him, even complimenting him on the profound poem that he wrote, it seems like nothing will satisfy him.  He's not sleeping well, the medication's not working, and he ends up storming out of the office.  I get it, he's been through some shit, but jeez, at least let some people help you out.  And I'm supposed to like this character with a giant chip on his shoulder?  His two younger brothers have something of a better attitude, they're partying at home with their ladies, one is married and the other is about to get married.  Plans for a bachelor party at a strip club and a bachelorette party the same night are in the works. Uh-oh. Nothing good ever happens at these events in a movie, probably not in real life either. 

At the same time, a burnt-out, hard-drinking police detective is raiding makeshift brothels, places where teen girls are taken prisoner and forced to service strangers, and they're kept doped up on elephant tranqulizers (seriously?) which is slowly killing them.  You'd think this would be bad for business, killing off their own kidnapped sex slaves, and you'd be right - the big boss just wants the drugs tweaked so they don't kill the girls, that's bad for business.  The cops raiding all his brothels, that's bad for business too, so he just wants things to go right.  Yeah, something tells me this is a bad business model all around, but what do I know?  That's Cleveland for you, I guess?  Like I say, in general this is not a happy film. 

Of course, these two different worlds are about to collide, the bride-to-be gets kidnapped after she disses two of the traffickers in the club, and they shove her into a black SUV out in the alley behind the club.  By the time her fiancé and his two brothers find out she's been taken, she's been moved to three different locations, microchipped and beat up, threatened and so on.  Plans are afoot to close the Cleveland operations and move all their girls to Vegas, and we assume by. then she'll be so deep into the system that she'll never be found again.  Look, I'm not saying this doesn't happen, a certain number of people do disappear every year, and for all I know, this is the type of thing that goes on.  But it's just not the type of thing I want to encounter when I sit down to watch a movie, and I don't think I'm alone here.  

The three brothers have to go all vigilante in order to figure out the rules of the underground trafficking system, they have to arm up and shoot a bunch of underlings just to find the underboss in charge, and then basically torture him to find the next guy up the chain, and so on.  They've got to go outside the law just to make things right, and I'm just not sure that sends the right message out to the audience.  In this films the cops are well-meaning but ineffective, and then even when the cops crack the case and come close to making a difference, they get the orders from on high to stand down, because the head villain's going to flip on some associates, so he gets immunity.  I'm not saying this doesn't happen in real life, but it's yet another bummer thing to use as a plot point in a film.  

The other weird thing to think about, the other weird message here, is how could this all have been avoided?  Should the bride-to-be have been more receptive to the thugs in the club?  Should she have shared drugs with them, or given them what they want (sexually) so they'd be happy and just go away?  I think she was in trouble no matter what, but that's HER fault for being a young, attractive woman partying in a club in a short dress?  That's also a terrible message.  Maybe this is really a complex examination of the troubled mess on the American streets, how in any big city in America there's some form of criminal underworld, guns, drugs and human trafficking that the justice system is nearly helpless to control.  It seems, though, that some filmmaker was headed more in the direction of "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun", and that didn't really work out well in the end, either.  

Maybe I'm off base here, maybe I missed the point, or I got the point but I refused to accept it - but this film's just a bummer all the way through.  Perhaps if the film had a happier ending, then it just wouldn't ring true.  But the first rule of filmmaking, I think, is to be entertaining, and I'm hard pressed to think of who would be entertained by the events herein. Actually, I think I'd worry about that person just a bit. 

Also starring Cole Hauser (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Shawn Ashmore (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Ashton Holmes (last seen in "Smart People"), Melissa Bolona, Sean Brosnan, Sophia Bush (last seen in "Marshall"), Mike Epps (last seen in "Death Wish" (2018)), Tiffany Brouwer (last seen in "The Help"), Jenna B. Kelly (last seen in "Extraction"), Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Rotimi (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Matthew T. Metzler, Kyle Stefanski, Boyd Kestner (last seen in "Appaloosa"), Nicolas Petron (last seen in "Reprisal"), David Vegh (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), with cameos from Martin Blencowe (last seen in "Extraction"), Christopher Rob Bowen (ditto), John Dauer (ditto).

RATING: 4 out of 10 airholes in a crate

The Cold Light of Day

Year 14, Day 21 - 1/21/22 - Movie #4,022

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 

Extraction (2015)

Year 14, Day 20 - 1/20/22 - Movie #4,021

BEFORE: Bruce Willis carries over to his fifth film this year, and I'm only at the midpoint, believe it or not - so four more films with him after this, and I hope they're all better than "Hard Kill".  The bar is set really low there, because they all kind of HAVE to be better than "Hard Kill".  This is the downside of juxtaposing similar movies, the bad ones look much worse by comparison to good movies - I'm recording "Tenet" today on demand, to dub a copy to DVD, just in case I want to watch it again when it's no longer available on HBO, and I'm reminded of what a fantastic movie that was, how it blew my mind and kept me awake at night.  But then, why can't other films be as good as "Tenet"?  Why can't EVERY film just be good?  Or at least better?

THE PLOT: A former CIA operative is kidnapped by a group of terrorists.  When his son learns there is no plan for his father to be saved, he launches his own rescue operation. 

AFTER: All right, at least this represents some improvement, when compared with "Hard Kill".  And remember, most every film this week is coming from the same studio, EFO Films, or Emmett/Furla/Oasis, who apparently signed Bruce Willis to a multi-year, 700-film contract, all of which got dumped to Netflix as some kind of package deal.  But it's really NOT a good sign that "Hard Kill" is more recent, because that means their output has been getting steadily WORSE, so along the way, quality control has been declining, or somebody seems to have given up. "Extraction" was released in 2015, five years before "Hard Kill" and also five years before the Chris Hemsworth film with the exact same title. (Remember, you can't copyright a title, but it does make sense to avoid titles that have already been used, especially within the same genre, like, say, action movies. Confusion in the marketplace doesn't help anybody, except maybe the smaller or worse film, just a bit.)

There are a few things to like here, I appreciate the idea of an ex-CIA operative who's got a grudge against his old employers.  And I can appreciate the same guy who's secretly keeping his son from qualifying for field work because he knows exactly how dangerous it can be.  In the opening sequence, set 10 years in the past, somebody figured out the identity of Agent Leonard Turner, also his home address, and they targeted his wife and son while he was away on an operation.  His son couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger and shoot the enemy invading his home, but thankfully Leonard's colleague, "Uncle Ken" arrived on the scene in time to save him.  Whether Ken is the boy's actual uncle, or this is just a term of endearment, is perhaps a little unclear. 

Fast forward to the present, and young Harry Turner is a CIA agent himself, all grown up, only he's being held back by his father's persuasive letters to keep him confined to a desk.  All that changes when Leonard is kidnapped by someone Arabic while undercover, trying to obtain a device called the Condor, a mobile device that can hack the entire world's telecommunications system. Yep, it's a similar device to the one seen yesterday in "Hard Kill", only with a little more explanation here about what, exactly, the device is capable of.  I told you some screenwriter has been playing "Mad Libs" with these scripts, here's some more evidence.  

Harry is deliberately kept out of the loop on his father's kidnapping investigation - this makes sense, he's much too close to the hostage emotionally to be expected to act rationally.  But what kind of movie would we have if every character just acted rationally?  So he hacks into the meeting to figure out what's going on with his father, thus proving that he's got the skills to be part of the investigation. Wait, what?  He should be penalized for disobeying his boss' orders, but I guess the CIA doesn't work like that, I guess they reward initiative, or just maybe some writer doesn't really understand how the CIA works.  My bet's on the latter.  So then Harry is escorted off the premises, since he's NOT part of the official rescue operation - hell, maybe there IS no official rescue operation - so naturally Harry breaks free from his escort and starts his own, going rogue.  Only in the movies, right?  This move in real life would probably get him kicked out of the agency.  

I get it, you can't really expect a movie about government agents to make real logical sense - most CIA work is probably very boring, involves a lot of surveillance and paperwork and is nothing like movie James Bond stuff.  Harry was stationed in Prague, and so naturally he hops a plane to Newark, where his father disappeared, and thanks to the magic of cinema, he's there in a flash, has no jet lag, and goes straight to work, and somehow the trail isn't cold yet.  And you gotta admit, Harry's very bold here, the whole world thinks his father's being held captive by some Saudi arms dealer, and Harry's the one saying, nope, I think that's not true, let me start my own investigation in this New Jersey biker bar, that should do it.  

He meets up with Victoria, a female operative in the field who's also been tracking the Condor device, and wouldn't you know it, he once had a relationship with her, so working together won't be awkward at all. She keeps trying to explain how things really work in the field, since this is his first operation, and he keeps pushing back to get her to do things his way.  Yeah, good luck with that. Meanwhile the CIA is secretly staying in touch with his "partner" and has also dispatched another operative to kill him, should things really get out of hand.  Sure, the CIA can spare an extra agent to hunt down Harry, but they can't spare anybody to locate Leonard - it seems like maybe they should have enough agents to do both things, but what do I know? 

Victoria and Harry work their way up the chain, from biker bar to garage mechanic to that hot new nightclub in town before they find the very American non-Arabic arms dealer who they think has Leonard and the Condor device. Yeah, it does not go well, but no more spoilers here.  What all these Mad Libs action movies have in common is that eventually everybody's true motives come out, and we eventually find out who was responsible for that mess years ago, and maybe things aren't really what they seemed to be at the start.  Obviously, some films handle these twists better than others, this one is not TOO bad on that front. 

I just realized that I didn't remember what happened at the end, so I must have fallen asleep once all the secrets were revealed.  That's not usually a good sign. So just now I pulled up Netflix on my phone and re-watched the last 10 minutes.  Yep, that's what happened, I fell asleep.  But good news, the world was saved from the thingy that could have knocked out all our phones and prevented 5G from becoming a thing.

A couple random points - yep, Bruce Willis shot all his scenes for this in one day.  Like I said, if you're a filmmaker and you can get Bruce Willis, then get Bruce Willis, but it's only for a limited time, so you'd better move things around to make the most out of that.  As for Gina Carano, the last time I saw her in a movie, "Haywire", I read in the notes that all of her lines were dubbed by another actress, Laura San Giacomo.  Now I understand why - in order to be in a motion picture with sound, which are all the rage these days, an actor needs to open their mouth when they say their lines, you'd think they'd teach this on the first day of acting school.  And Kellan Lutz has been in some very big movies, and I guess he's doing well on the "FBI" CBS shows right now, but he's also been in a lot of clunker movies - to me this one's right down the middle, not great but not terrible either. 

NITPICK POINT: Nice try, attempting to make Alabama look like Newark, New Jersey, but that just didn't work.  I'm guessing that Newark is a lot more built-up and as a result just doesn't look that nice.  Unless there was another teleportation device used or the characters drove from New Jersey to Alabama in record time, but that doesn't make sense either. 

Also starring Kellan Lutz (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Gina Carano (last seen in "Haywire"), D.B. Sweeney (last seen in "Captive State"), Dan Bilzerian (last seen in "War Dogs"), Steve Coulter (last seen in "The Hunt"), Heather Johansen (last seen in "First Kill"), Martin Blencowe (ditto), John Dauer (ditto), Roman Mitichyan (last seen in "Warrior"), Christopher Rob Bowen (last seen in "Reprisal"), Rob Steinberg (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Joshua Mikel (last seen in "Stuber"), Nick Loeb (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), David Gordon (last seen in "Marauders"), Richie Chance (ditto), Lydia Hull (ditto), Summer Altice (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Tyler Jon Olson (last seen in "Hard Kill"), Lindsey Pelas, Sierra Love, Nathan Varnson, Nicole Gomez, Linda Lind, Olga Valentina, Jeffery Patterson, Sydney Fine, Jillian Sheen, Jacques Devore, Jenna B. Kelly.

RATING: 4 out of 10 angry bikers (attacking one at time, of course...)

Hard Kill

Year 14, Day 19 - 1/19/22 - Movie #4,020

BEFORE: OK, things are moving forward, as they do, and behind the scenes I'm working on my documentary chain, which will happen sometime in the summer, I can't really be more specific right now, but since as usual it will have a few films about musicians ("Summer of Soul", and recent documentaries about Sparks Brothers, Rick James and Gordon Lightfoot are definite possibilities), comedians (Dick Gregory, Betty White, John Belushi and Don Rickles) and various other famous people (Rita Moreno, Jacques Costeau and the creators of "Sesame Street", if I can manage all that) I'm treating it like a big set of concert performances, and right now we alll just don't know when concerts will be possible again.  I'll keep you informed, but I'm in no rush, summer's the perfect time for docs.

Also, as the Bruce Willis chain rolls on (he carries over once again, from "First Kill") and it's been eating away at me that I overstuffed my January, and this action film kick that I'm on is now scheduled to drag into February.  February 1 is traditionally the start of a month-plus of romance films, in the last ten years I've been late by one day only one time - and this year I've been seriously thinking about starting the romance chain on February 6!  It's madness!  I've never started this topic so late, not in the last ten years, anyway!  I'd resigned myself to this because I couldn't really see what to cut - sure, it would have been easy to cut the terrible Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage movies planned, only I haven't seen them, so I don't know which ones are most terrible, not yet anyway.

So, I made a decision, I'm cutting most of the Nic Cage movies from January's schedule - try not to panic or celebrate too much, depending on how you feel about him. The answer's been staring me in the face all this time, I just didn't want to recognize it - I've got the whole year ahead of me, I can cut out 7 of the Nic Cage films from January (leaving one behind, but I'll explain when I get there) and I can try to get to them ASAP in March, right after the romance chain ends.  I even already see a way to do that, so Mr. Cage is hereby rescheduled for mid- to late March.  And we'll start up the romance chain on February 1, as nature intended - by then I should be desperate to get out of the action movie genre. Hell, I already am. 

But moving these films to March solves a couple of problems, again, all caused BY ME when I stuffed too many "Must See" films with Asian actors into January, ones that were NOT part of the original plan.  Sometimes I just see new paths and feel I have to take them, so that's why the plan needs to be flexible - and there was so much overlap among these action films that excising a small section CAREFULLY and CORRECTLY means that the chain will just close up around the hole - so really, I don't know why I'm even telling you about the plan, except I promised you some Nicolas Cage, and I will deliver, eventually.  And perhaps in March two films on my list with Nic Cage that are temporarily unavailable will become available again, on another platform.  It's certainly possible. 

THE PLOT: The work of billionaire tech CEO Donovan Chalmers is so valuable that he hires mercenaries to protect it, and a terrorist group kidnaps his daughter just to get it. 

AFTER: Man, this movie was DUMB!  I'm not allowed to use the "R" word in reviews any more, but let's just say that if this movie was rated "R" it didn't stand for "restricted". I wish I'd known how bad this one was, I would have skipped it and given myself the night off, that would have been preferable to watching it, by a long shot.  

Imagine this, if you will, a billionaire tech CEO hires a team of mercenaries to protect him and his invention, while he meets with the terrorist who's kidnapped his daughter.  But while showing them the deserted warehouse where the exchange is going to happen, his assistant lets him know that this isn't just a walkthrough, in preparation for the day of the potential attack, THIS IS THE DAY.  Because we all know when you hire armed bodyguards, the absolute LAST thing you want to do is to give them a chance to prepare, it's better to just throw them right into the fire.  It keeps them on edge, you see, it's better if they don't have a chance to gather intel, proper equipment, extra ammo, a good night's sleep - that's just going to make them SOFT.  This could be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.  

"Hi, welcome to the team, I hope you packed a gun and some snacks, because the terrorist is already on the way over."  What a crock.  And the terrorist is named "The Pardoner", which is probably the worst name for a villain I've ever heard, and I read comic books where Spider-Man fights the Lizard, the Sandman and the Green Goblin.  Not to mention Doctor Octopus, the Chameleon, the Grizzly and the Vulture.  "The Pardoner" has all those guys beat.  Did he get this name for his eternally forgiving nature, nah, I don't think so, so Sweet Jesus, WHY?  

There are so many stupid moments here, like the team complaining about the large number of windows in the warehouse, how this makes everyone vulnerable to, say, sniper fire from outside.  But nobody DOES anything about this, like block the windows, or stay away from the windows - so, they're AWARE of the danger, but they don't care enough to do anything about it?  Huh?  Or later, during the attack, when all the good guys left alive sort of just pick a room and hole up in it, because the terrorists couldn't POSSIBLY go floor by floor and search room by room to find them.  Just going into a random room does NOT constitute "hiding".  

The worst is probably this machine, the MacGuffin, the thing that the Pardoner wants, which is called Project 725, which is a device that, you know, DOES stuff.  The Pardoner wants it because with it, he can take over the world, by, umm...doing what, exactly?  Controlling things?  Yeah, sure, but HOW? Is it like Ticketmaster, where he gets to impose a fee on every transaction everywhere, will it make planes fall out of the sky like 5G transmitters, or will he take mental control of every human like with a Cerebro device?  Yeah, nobody really knows.  But the billionaire knows the codes that will activate it, and the terrorist needs the codes, he tries roughing up the billionaire's daughter, but he can't KILL the daughter, because then he'll NEVER get the codes.  So the Pardoner and the billionaire are at an impasse, and the writer couldn't even think of a way to end that, so they just make the Pardoner leave the room for a bathroom break or something so the billionaire can somehow slip out of his loose restraints.  Lame. 

Meanwhile the hired mercenaries keep getting shot, because none of them seem to understand the concept of hiding behind cover, even though there's plenty of cover in the warehouse.  Which is odd because one team member complained at the start about how there were "too many places to hide" there, but then when the firefight starts and they NEED to hide, a lot of them forget to do exactly that.  It's one thing to be well-paid for a mission, but you need to be ALIVE at the end of the mission to spend that money.  

This one's even worse than "Cosmic Sin", and that's saying something.  This has a perfect score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, I sort of wished I'd checked that first, but it's not something I'm in the habit of doing.  My bad. 

Also starring Jesse Metcalfe, Natalie Eva Marie, Lala Kent, Texas Battle (last seen in "Marauders"), Sergio Rizzuto (last seen in "Reprisal"), Swen Temmel (last seen in "Boss Level"), Tyler Jon Olson (also carrying over from "First Kill"), Jon Galanis (also last seen in "Marauders"), Jacquie Nguyen, Leslee Emmett, Timothy C. Sullivan, Alex Eckert. 

RATING: 2 out of 10 scenes with more debating than shooting

First Kill

Year 14, Day 18 - 1/18/22 - Movie #4,019

BEFORE: I'm trying to work sort of thematically here, and to not just go by the linking - apparently a bank heist figures in to this film as well, so let me knock this one out and then move on to another topic, I think kidnapping is coming up next. 

Bruce Willis carries over from "Reprisal" - and so do four other actors, what exactly is going on here?  

THE PLOT: A Wall Street broker is forced to evade a police officer investigating a bank robbery as he attempts to recover the stolen money in exchange for his son's life. 

AFTER: "First Kill" was shot in Granville and Columbus, Ohio and released in 2017 - while yesterday's film was shot in Cincinnati and released in 2018.  This gives me some insight, perhaps, into the logistics of filmmaking - as in, what is Bruce Willis's filming schedule like?  He's been in about four or five released movies pretty consistently lately, the guy's really never stopped working, and as a result, he's coming close to challenging Samuel L. Jackson for most appearances overall out of my over 4,000 films watched. (It's really tough to calculate this, due to the way that the IMDB treats cameo appearances and archive footage, which is to day, they don't count at all.  To me, everything should count.)

This is what I like to think about, the logistics of filmmaking - how many days a year does Bruce Willis work?  Does he go out on tour, like a rock star, just going wherever the gig is?  What was the motivation to go film in Ohio, twice?  Did he fly back to L.A. in between or were the shoots done together, so he could just travel from Columbus to Cincinnati, and did he still have to change planes in Atlanta?  Or did he drive between the two cities, and carpool with the four other actors who were in both films?  I guess only his personal assistant knows.  

What's really going on here, it turns out, is that there's a production company that makes a LOT of low- to mid-budget action films, and they've probably got Bruce Willis signed to a multi-picture deal, or he just likes working with them so he does it again and again.  This company is called Emmett/Furla Oasis, or EFO Films, and they've produced a ton of films, like "16 Blocks", "End of Watch", "Alex Cross", "88 Minutes" and "Righteous Kill" - along with most of my programming for the week, "Boss Level" and four films with Bruce Willis in this chain, and the "Escape Plan" sequels I've got scheduled at the end of the month.  So I'm guessing that a bunch of these films had the same distributor, and they all got licensed to Netflix at once, as some kind of package deal.  

The plot here concerns the aftermath of a bank robbery, where the robbers are meeting and discussing how to split the money, and of course since this is middle America, these are meetings they have out in the woods, not in some office or diner booth.  And these tend to be the kind of meetings that only one party walks away from.  Into this mix stumbles a Wall Street broker, taking his young son back to where he grew up, to teach him how to hunt deer.  The son has repeatedly been bullied at school, and I have to point out that wanting to bond with him in this case is fine, but taking him out to hunt deer is a terrible idea.  It's just not a solution to the current problem, and is more likely to turn the kid into the next school shooter or even the next Jeffrey Dahmer.  Just saying.  Maybe karate lessons would be more appropriate?

Anyway, the father and the son (who hunt in the rain for some reason, I'd pack it in if I were them...) end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and see a man get shot in this dispute over the bank money.  The father then kills the other man (in self-defense) only to learn that he might be a cop.  He saves the life of the first guy (the broker's wife just happens to be a surgeon, trained in trauma/ER medicine) and is rewarded for his efforts when his son is taken hostage, and he's now required to find a lost key, pick up the bag of money and deliver it in exchange. 

I won't say it's all been done before, because I don't think that is has, but something feels very familiar about the way this guy is drawn into a situation that keeps getting worse, no matter what he does, and it's not even his fault.  I feel like some screenwriter's just playing a game of "Action Movie Mad-Libs", because there's so much overlap here with "Marauders" and "First Kill", to name just a few.  "The motivation for this (type of criminal) comes from a sick (name of family member) who's dying from (name of terminal disease) which forces him to kidnap (son or daughter) of a (name of more normal profession)."

I'm not saying this is a terrible film, but if it feels like it was filmed in just two weeks, that's because it was.  Again, it seems that Bruce Willis is a very busy man, but if you can get Bruce Willis for your movie, you should definitely get Bruce Willis for your movie.  However, you won't have the luxury of shooting in sequence, you'll probably have to shoot all of his scenes together, over the course of just two or three days, because he's got other places to be and other action movies to appear in.  I should also note that this film is available for FREE (with ads) on imdb.tv, which is also accessible through AmazonPrime.  We all know now, the best films are the ones you have to pay for, and this one is free, so don't expect too much. 

What's missing here?  I suppose there should be a scene at the end that demonstrates to us that little Danny's bullying problem is now solved, because that was the whole point of taking him hunting in the first place.  OK, so the hunting trip was a bust, and the family ended up getting involved with a bunch of criminals and having to fight for their lives - BUT, Danny got some good advice from the guy who held him hostage and let him play violent video games, so why can't we see if the weekend had the desired effect?  If would be like if "Back to the Future III" didn't show us Marty McFly avoiding his car accident at the end by refusing to drag-race, we'd end up feeling like the whole adventure was pointless. Right? 

NITPICK POINT: This film features the (destined to be) classic line: "I'll wait for dark, then I'll go look for the key then..."  Umm, great plan, genius, but how are you going to FIND the key in the dark? 

Also starring Hayden Christensen (last seen in "The Virgin Suicides"), Ty Shelton, Megan Leonard (last seen in "Aftermath"), Gethin Anthony (last seen in "Kodachrome"), William DeMeo, Deb G. Girdler (last seen in "Carol"), Tyler Jon Olson (also carrying over from "Reprisal"), Shea Buckner (ditto), Martin Blencowe (ditto), John Dauer (ditto), Jesse Pruett (ditto), Magi Avila, Christine Dye, Charlie Roetting, Chris Moss, Chelsea Mee, Robert Harvey (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 tin cans for target practice

Reprisal

Year 14, Day 17 - 1/17/22 - Movie #4,018

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

Cosmic Sin

Year 14, Day 16 - 1/16/22 - Movie #4,017

BEFORE: Frank Grillo carries over from "Boss Level", and I'm kicking off a week of Bruce Willis movies, most of which are streaming on Netflix.  Today's film has a very low score on the IMDB, so I guess I'm not expecting much, at this point my watchlist on Netflix is so big, I'll take clearing four or five films off of there as some form of a win, though. 

Last December I needed a couple Bruce Willis films to help me make a connection, but I just didn't have many slots left in the year at that time, so I was unable to squeeze any others in.  When I saw how many were on the list, though, I vowed to circle back to him, so here I go.  I'd rather burn these films off in January, anyway, because early in the year, I've got slots to spare.  Well, I really don't because any extra slots filled here I'll have to account for at the end of 2022, so if I run out of room then I'll know who to blame. 

THE PLOT: Seven rogue soldiers launch a preemptive strike against a newly discovered alien civilization in the hopes of ending an interstellar war before it starts. 

AFTER: Yes, this is a terrible movie - but I can't just say that and walk away, I have to explore WHY this movie is terrible, at least to some degree.  The title "Cosmic Sin" refers to the genocide of another civilization, which is obviously a sin, a really BIG one, on a cosmic level.  But for these soldier/astronauts, it's also the NAME of their mission, so this means they're up to no good, right?  This must be what Donald Trump's "Space Force" turns into, 500 years from now.  Sign up, travel the cosmos, meet interesting new alien races, and kill them.

The good news here is that it's the year 2525, and as Zager & Evans once sang, somehow mankind is still alive.  But it's a complicated story, which the film boils down to some simple historical events listed at the start of the movie - in 2031, the first Mars colony was founded.  In 2042 some kind of (unexplainable) Alliance was formed, and quantum propulsion allowed (will allow) humanity to travel outside the solar system.  Then in 2281 the Mars colony failed (will fail) for some reason, and humanity survives only in three places, Earth, Zafdie and Ellora.  It's also pretty maddening that we don't see any of those in this movie.  

Things were pretty great (?) until Zafdie tried to secede from the Union (oh, if ONLY there were a historical precedent for what to do when a colony wants to secede...I guess we shouldn't wish for things we can't have...). So instead of learning from the U.S. Civil War, Earth instead went with the solution that ended World War II, just drop a bomb on them.  That was an A-bomb, this was a Q-bomb (Q is for quantum) but the principle is the same, millions of deaths are OK as long as America (or Earth) comes out on top.  The war hero (villain?) who dropped the bomb is James Ford, played by Bruce Willis, the go-to actor whether you need to blow up an asteroid about to hit the Earth or a rogue colony on another planet. 

For some reason, that's the best option here, a "pre-emptive" strike, which, in the end, is the same thing as a "strike", it's just using the excuse that the aliens are PROBABLY going to kill us all as an excuse to kill them all.  For James Ford, it's a way to get his military rank back and his dishonorable discharge reversed, but really, is this the best way to handle an alien race, shouldn't we try diplomacy first?  I mean, it turns out these parasitic aliens DID intend to wipe us all out, but the soldiers here didn't KNOW that at the time, they were just erring on the side of caution, which I don't think is enough of a reason to commit such a cosmic sin.  It sets a bad precedent for future interstellar relations, to start with - Earthlings will always be known as the culture that shot first and asked questions later.  Which may be accurate, but I just don't think it's the reputation that we want, even if it's the one we deserve. 

The rest of the film is a big pile of hot garbage, though - junk science abounds, the people who work on the quantum bomb don't even seem to understand what they're doing, and come on, the lead character is placed on a team with his ex-wife just so he can work out his personal issues and blow up aliens at the same time?  Give me a break. It's just a shoot 'em up at the end of the day, and any technical problems that arise manage only to delay the Big Boom just so the whole film can be extended out close to 90 minutes.  This film won't take up a lot of your time, but it also won't provide any nutritional value for your brain - the future, unfortunately, is just more of the same old, just in space. 

Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Marauders"), Brandon Thomas Lee, Corey Large (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Perrey Reeves (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), C.J. Perry (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Lochlyn Munro (last seen in "The Predator"), Costas Mandylor (last seen in "Mobsters"), Adelaide Kane, Eva De Dominici, Sarah May Sommers (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood"), Trevor Gretzky, Johnny Messner (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Trevor Brotherton, Everly Large, Francis Cronin. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 converted jukeboxes