BEFORE: I've got a few films with Antonio Banderas lined up in the chain, and I just realized that I can watch them in almost any order, I just need to end with the right one. So I'm changing the order around a bit from my first plan, but that's OK. Antonio Banderas carries over from "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish".
THE PLOT: A fast-talking lawyer transforms his body and takes a vow of silence, not to be broken until he finds out who killed his wife and daughter and has his revenge.
AFTER: Well, it's a bit of a bold move to have a lead character that doesn't say anything for most of the movie. (There's a narration, which mostly explains how much he talked as a lawyer, before his wife and daughter were killed, and after that, he decided to listen more and speak less.). The last film I saw that tried to pull this off was "Willy's Wonderland", where Nic Cage faced off against a bunch of possessed animatronic pizza restaurant robots, and his character didn't say a word for the entire film. But here, I have to wonder if this was some kind of artistic statement, or something more practical necessitated by the budget - because if you think about it, the less dialogue there is in a movie, the less the sound editor has to do, the less the script supervisor has to do, and so on. Or, I could also wonder if the lack of dialogue was caused by, say, an actor who couldn't or wouldn't learn his lines. Just a thought - if an actor was in the mood to be difficult, this little "vow of silence" story device would still allow for the movie to be completed, and much faster and easier, too. I'll have to look into this further...
What happens is, this high-level defense attorney, Frank Valera, known for manipulating the system to get his clients' cases dismissed on technicalities, is busy at work on the night of his daughter's talent show appearance (held at the Hard Rock Cafe, for some reason...) and he says he's going to be there, but he's clearly lying. Sure, he leaves five minutes before the show, but gets caught in traffic, because it's raining and it's Friday night, so come on, he had no intention of arriving on time. If he really wanted to be there, he would have taken the subway across town - who takes a limo when it's raining and expects to arrive on time? What an ass. But hey, at least he feels guilty when he doesn't see her perform, and then much more guilty when his wife and daughter don't come home that night, and their bodies are found in the morning.
He has friends on the force, but the detectives in charge of the case don't seem to be doing much - they're about as effective as the police in "I Don't Feel at Home in this World Anymore", which is to say, not effective at all. They say there are no clues except a few gold fibers, and before long their murders are treated as a cold case. Frank is so distraught he begins drinking heavily, and then when he notices an illegal MMA fight club going on in the back of a bar (sure, because that's typical for Pittsburgh...) he joins in, but only to be a punching bag for the other fighters, because he feels like he deserves it. He's not wrong, I think.
But somehow all of this teaches him how to take a punch, and then the next illogical step is for him to develop super fighting skills, thanks to a training montage and some martial arts senseis. He hits the streets to find the unsavory characters who killed his wife and daughter - but jeez, it's going to be hard to interrogate people if he's taken that vow of silence, right? Yeah, this just does not make any sense - supposedly he can hold up a photo of his wife and daughter and gauge from a criminal's reaction, or lack thereof, if they're the guilty party. I call B.S. on this. Frank's plan, apparently, is to beat up every bad dude in the city, gauge their reaction to the photo, and then find the killer by process of elimination - should only take him about 700 years to get that done, as there are a lot of bad dudes in Pittsburgh.
But I guess somehow this works for him, because after he beats up and eliminates everyone who could have been a random killer, that leaves him with a short list of people who maybe had a grudge against him. He did represent a lot of high-profile criminals and he did get a lot of cases thrown out of court, but damn it, if there were people who had a grudge against him, why they hell didn't he START there? That's a rookie sleuthing mistake for sure. No spoilers here, but COME ON, why didn't he make that connection? I guess everything's obvious after the fact, plus then it would have been like a half-hour movie if he had.
I guess we get used to crime stories where detectives search for clues, gather evidence and put timelines together, and therefore it's a bit shocking when someone just decides to keep punching their way up the chain until they get some answers. I supposed you can justify violence in response to violence, but breaking and entering to gather evidence just means that Frank's form of vigilante justice would never hold up in court - which is exactly the sort of thing that a lawyer would be aware of, so why doesn't Frank seem to realize this? Sure, he got fired from his firm but he still should know everything that a lawyer should know, including due process and chain of possession of evidence. Some really big NITPICK POINTS here, probably too many to number. Just sloppy, sloppy screenwriting.
Sharper eyes than mine noticed from the road signs and restroom signs that this movie was not filmed in the United States - I mean, a train yard looks the same in any country, but clearly the exteriors were not filmed in Pittsburgh. If you guessed it was filmed in Bulgaria (and I don't know why you would) you would be correct. I guess somebody couldn't afford Pittsburgh exteriors? Well, the film only made about $300,000 at the box office, so maybe that was a good call, save the money wherever you can during the shoot. I guess this got made on the cheap a couple years after the first "John Wick" film was a hit, and revenge action movies with soft-spoken male leads were hot again?
Also starring Karl Urban (last seen in "Doom"), Paz Vega (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Clint Dyer (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Cristina Serafini, Lillian Blankenship, Robert Forster (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Velislav Pavlov (last seen in "The Expendables 2"), Johnathon Schaech (last seen in "Arsenal"), Mark Rhino Smith (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Atanas Srebrev (last seen in "Hellboy' (2019)), Raicho Vasilev, Elizabeth Brace (last seen in "Maleficent; Mistress of Evil"), Isaac Florentine, Tim Man
RATING: 4 out of 10 quotes from Marcus Aurelius
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