BEFORE: I sort of forgot that Taraji P. Henson was in both "Think Like a Man" movies, so this little block of three more of her films is going to mean 5 appearances for the year so far, and that's enough to make her tied for the lead, along with Toni Collette and Jennifer Lopez. As of tomorrow, that is. It's fine, I've got no problems with a three-way tie between three prolific actresses, of course that lead won't hold up through the summer, probably, because there's the whole documentary block coming, and I can see that there are people who frequently appear in docs, like David Letterman and Johnny Carson, who are scheduled to appear a lot more. It'll still be another two months before I get there, most likely.
Taraji P. Henson carries over from "Coffee & Kareem".
THE PLOT: Mary, a hit woman working for an organized crime family in Boston, has her life completely turned around when a professional hit goes bad and a young boy crosses her path.
AFTER: Some things in common with yesterday's comedy, like Ms. Henson plays a mother (or mother figure) to a black teen with a dead father. Also there are ample opportunities for her character to shoot people, which popped up in "Coffee & Kareem" more often than you might think. But here it's totally justified by the plot, since she plays a hit woman working for the Boston mob who suddenly decides she wants out of the action, to give this mothering thing a chance and try to start making up for all the people she's killed. The problem is, she's too entrenched in the "family" for them to let her go.
So let me see if I've got this straight, she's killed a lot of people over the years, let's say. But there's ONE that she regrets, out of all of them, a small-time bookie that she killed on orders from her superiors. So she somehow tracks down THAT GUY'S son and befriends him, and feeds him and gives him a place to live so that he won't end up in jail, or just hustling on the streets of Boston. It's all great and noble that she wants to leave this life, and go live with him in Florida or Montana or something, but it's just not that easy for her to leave this career behind. For one thing, she knows too much, so the theory is that her "family" would kill her rather than let her walk away. She tries to create chaos by killing "Uncle", a high-level drug dealer - maybe she thought that his death would cause a power struggle in the city, and she could slip away in the confusion? Or better yet, somebody would blame her employers for the death of Uncle, and if her boss dies, she could just walk away? It's a bit unclear what exactly she was trying to do.
But it seems perhaps the only way out of this killing people business is to kill more people, only she turns her sights on the higher-ups in her own organization, Benny, who happens to be the father of her ex-boyfriend, Tom, and then Tom himself. I can't tell really if this is ironic, that she has to kill more people to get herself to a place where she doesn't have to kill more people, or if this is anything close to the way criminal organizations really work. I just wonder if the screenwriters have any idea, or if they're just making it all up as they go.
You WILL hear the song "Proud Mary" in this film, the Tina Turner version, of course (not the Ike Turner intro, Ike's been cancelled, for good reason...) but they make you wait for it. It only plays during the final action shoot-out scene and also during closing credits. I've got some issues with the song, which of course I knew first as a Creedence Clearwater song, and yes, it was written by John Fogerty. But I didn't know until today, thanks to the closed captions, that the song lyrics are really "Pumped a lot of 'TANE down in New Orleans." For over 30 years, I thought the line was pumped a lot of PAIN down in New Orleans." I thought the line referred to gas, of course, but pain as a metaphor for gas seemed oddly poetic somehow. But I was wrong, it's apparently TANE which is short for octane, and the only problem is that I've never heard anybody call gasoline TANE or even OCTANE, it's just not the way people tend to talk. So I still like my version better, about pumping PAIN, call me crazy if you want.
There are other questions, too, about lines like "Left a good job in the city." Well, if the job was good, why did you leave it? How come you never saw "The good side of the city" until you took a ride on a riverboat? Does the city just look better from that angle, or is there something else going on? And what about "You don't have to worry, if you got no money"? I kind of doubt that, the people on the river have to make ends meet, too. I'd like to hear about somebody taking a ride on the riverboat queen and thinking that everything is free, because "people on the river are happy to give." I bet they'd find out the hard way that this just doesn't ring true - sure, it rhymes nicely, but you can't get something for nothing, no matter where you are.
Also starring Billy Brown (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Jahi Di'Allo Winston (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Danny Glover (last seen in "Spieberg"), Margaret Avery (ditto), Neal McDonough (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Xander Berkeley (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Rade Serbedzija (last seen in "The Promise"), Erik LaRay Harvey (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"), Owen Burke (last seen in "Confess, Fletch"), Bo Cleary (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), James Milord, Alex Portenko, Gene Ravvin, Airon Armstrong, Jose Guns Alves (last seen in "Free Guy"), Kevin O. Peterson, Vladimir Orlov (last seen in "The Tourist"), Al'Jaleel McGhee, Roger Dillingham Jr. (last seen in "I Care a Lot"), Shawn Doherty, Yuri Quinnie.
RATING: 5 out of 10 hot dogs from a street cart
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