ARSENAL (US/UK - 2017) Directed by Steven C. Miller. Written by Jason Mosberg. Cast: Adrian Grenier, John Cusack, Nicolas Cage, Johnathan Schaech, Lydia Hull, Mark McCullough, Tyler Jon Olson, Abbie Gayle, Christopher Coppola, Christopher Rob Bowen, Megan Leonard, C.J. LeBlanc. (R, 92 mins) It's only the first weekend of 2017 and we've got the year's first of undoubtedly several straight-to-VOD thrillers with either Nicolas Cage or John Cusack--in this case, both. The CON AIR stars were last seen together in 2013's surprisingly good THE FROZEN GROUND but with ARSENAL, they're already blowing their New Year's resolutions to start appearing in better movies. Scripted by a debuting Jason Mosberg and directed by VOD mercenary Steven C. Miller (whose not-terrible 2016 Michael Mann knockoff MARAUDERS was the best-by-default entry in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis phones in his performance from his luxury hotel suite" series), ARSENAL's biggest problem is that it can't figure out what it wants to be. Set and shot in Biloxi, MS, with a special appearance by the Biloxi Shuckers minor league baseball team, ARSENAL opens in a such a somber and downbeat fashion with a focus on two teenage brothers in the early 1990s that it could almost pass for an early David Gordon Green indie drama. Older Mikey pushes little brother JP around but there's genuine love between them as they come from a broken home and have one another's back. 23 years later, they still live in the same town but a lot's changed: JP (ENTOURAGE's Adrian Grenier, who was in MARAUDERS and is looking like a new regular in these things) is married with a newborn daughter and owns a successful construction company, while Mikey (Johnathan Schaech, already a regular in these things) is a perpetual fuck-up who was booted out of the military, can't hold down a job, and has an ex-wife and a daughter who hate him. He's also a low-level criminal with tenuous ties to Eddie King (Cage), a coke-snorting crime lord who holds court in a skeezy titty bar on the outskirts of town. Mikey is such a loser that JP loaned him $10,000 to pay his back rent and get braces for his daughter, but instead Mikey spent it on a cocaine shipment that he planned to flip for double the price. Of course, other lowlifes knew he had the stash and jacked it from him, leaving him with nothing. Mikey needs money, and so does Eddie. He's in debt to some NYC mobsters who have sent his younger brother Buddy (Cage's brother Christopher Coppola) to collect. Eddie comes up with a half-assed plan to stage Mikey's kidnapping and shake JP down for a $350,000 ransom. Things obviously don't work out for anyone, starting with the viewer (I'd say "audience," but I don't wish to exaggerate).
ARSENAL's more serious side would work better if Grenier and Schaech were more engaging actors. But that seriousness is undermined by frequent instances of ludicrously over-the-top violence, including a cartoonishly splattery climax more fitting for the insane Paul Walker thriller RUNNING SCARED or the gloriously bonkers PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, with slo-mo bullets blowing up everything from skulls to ballsacks with wild abandon. Grenier and Schaech seem to be in a serious drama about the family ties that bind, while Cage is off in his own movie where he's inexplicably reprising his role in the barely-released 1993 campy pseudo-noir bomb DEADFALL, which he agreed to do as a favor to Christopher Coppola, who wrote and directed. Cage's performance--possibly his most gonzo in a career full of them and augmented by what appears to be a Tony Clifton-meets-Sonny Bono wig and mustache combo with a putty nose--is the only reason anyone remembers DEADFALL, a film that's barely watchable despite a cast that includes Michael Biehn, Charlie Sheen, James Coburn, Talia Shire, Micky Dolenz, Clarence Williams III, Angus Scrimm, and Peter Fonda. While Cage's Eddie was killed off midway through DEADFALL, he's clearly playing the same character here, right down to the wig, the stache, and the fake schnoz, which may go down as 2017's most obscure and self-indulgent inside joke.
In ARSENAL, Cage is here to do exactly what you expect him to do: shout, yell, scream, spaz out, and totally Cage it up as his putty nose perpetually seems on the verge of falling off. He's introduced shoving a steel pipe into a guy's mouth and driving it out the back of his skull with a baseball bat and he spends much of the second half of the film covered in blood after shooting and clawing his way out of a mob ambush. If ARSENAL went for this level of sustained lunacy for its entire run time, it might grow exhausting but it would at least be interesting for Nic Cage fans. No one cares about JP taking a stand against Eddie (telling his wife "Katrina didn't run us out and neither will Eddie King!") or shitbag Mikey's redemption. ARSENAL tries to have it both ways and succeeds at neither. It also fails to find a purpose for Cusack, sporting a doo-rag, a ball cap, shades, and his ubiquitous vape pen in a thoroughly superfluous supporting role as Sal, a shady undercover cop who's buddies with JP and Mikey and dispenses sage advice to JP about how to handle Eddie. Sal does nothing to advance the plot, and Cusack could've been completely eliminated with no effect at all on the movie. As usual for this sort of gig in the Cusackalypse Now canon, he looks haggard and sleep-deprived, like he just crawled out of a dumpster, exerting no effort to camouflage his utter lack of interest in the entire project. Cage is fully aware that this is shit as well, but he at least embraces the notion of self-parody and gives you what you came to see.
MARAUDERS (US/UK - 2016) Directed by Steven C. Miller. Written by Michael Cody and Chris Sivertson. Cast: Christopher Meloni, Bruce Willis, Dave Bautista, Adrian Grenier, Johnathan Schaech, Lydia Hull, Tyler Jon Olson, Texas Battle, Richie Chance, Ryan O'Nan, Christopher Rob Bowen, Chris Hill, Tara Holt. (R, 107 mins) As far as B-grade Michael Mann knockoffs go, MARAUDERS isn't terrible, and it's the closest that anything in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis phones in his performance from his hotel room" series has come to being good. Yes, it's been a little over two months since PRECIOUS CARGO graced VOD menus nationwide, and Bruno's back in another luxurious hotel suite, giving vague orders over the phone to recurring co-stars he has yet to acknowledge or even meet for MARAUDERS, which reunites him with his EXTRACTION director Steven C. Miller (not to be confused with Brian A. Miller, who directed Willis in VICE and THE PRINCE). Willis is still as bored and as openly contemptuous as ever of what he does for a living, but Miller seems to be stepping up his game a bit with MARAUDERS, demonstrating surprising flair in some imaginative and well-shot robbery sequences as well as doing a nice job with some Cincinnati location work, which you don't see every day in a Hollywood movie. Also working in MARAUDERS' favor--and possibly inspiring Miller--is a marvelously entertaining performance by Christopher Meloni, who takes his Stabler routine from his LAW & ORDER: SVU days and dials it up to 11, free to drop F-bombs and bon mots to his heart's content, approaching this project like it was going to be released on 3000 screens nationwide. There's a big HEAT influence on MARAUDERS, and Meloni appropriately pays tribute to Al Pacino with a few of his own "GREAT ASS!" moments throughout. As dumb and convoluted as MARAUDERS gets, it's a must-see for Meloni fans.
A string of intricately-staged bank robberies have struck branches of Hubert National Bank, owned by financial titan Jeffrey Hubert (Willis). After the latest in Cincinnati, FBI Special Agent Montgomery (Meloni) and his team--Stockwell (Dave Bautista), Chase (Lydia Hull), and rookie Wells (Adrian Grenier)--are baffled when the only fingerprints at crime scenes are those of a dead, disgraced Special Forces soldier implicated with other rogue military personnel in the kidnapping and murder of Hubert's younger brother several years ago. The plot thickens--almost too much for even the most devoted fan of THE BIG SLEEP to figure out--as the perpetually pissed-off, ticking time bomb Montgomery butts heads with corrupt Cincinnati homicide detective Mims (Johnathan Schaech), who keeps trying to shoehorn his way into the investigation and is caught trying to stash away evidence, and a smug and evasive Hubert, who may or may not be involved in a complex plot to avenge his brother's murder, which may or may not involve bad cops, bad Feds, an in-the-closet Ohio senator, and whatever else the script (co-written by I KNOW WHO KILLED ME director Chris Sivertson) pulls out of its ass.
While the story becomes increasingly improbable and bogged down by predictable twists--not helped by the clumsy way Miller telegraphs them--it's always watchable thanks to Meloni's junkyard-dog of a performance. He also seems fully cognizant of the cliches he's been tasked with incorporating into his character. You can almost see him rolling his eyes at the notion of yet another lone-wolf cop mourning the loss of a dead wife (an undercover Fed tortured and killed by the leader of a Mexican cartel, the investigation of whom was fucked up by--who else?--that asshole Mims) by going into the same bar every night and ordering a glass of pinot noir and not drinking it while once again listening to the last two voice mails she ever sent him, then going home and sitting in his empty apartment and pointing a loaded gun to his head. Meloni obviously knows MARAUDERS is junk, but he's still giving 110% and quite clearly having fun with it. As a result, he almost single-handedly elevates a fairly routine cops-and-robbers story into something that's intermittently insane enough to be legitimately good in fits and starts. I don't want to oversell MARAUDERS. It's a dumb B-movie that's perfectly at home on VOD (it probably would've been a moderate hit in theaters ten years ago, when Meloni was still on SVU), but anyone who follows these kinds of movies will almost instantly recognize this as being significantly better and more ambitious than much of its ilk. Had Willis bothered to stay awake for his scant few appearances (this is another one where he's on the set for two days tops, but to Miller's credit, he manages to coax Willis out of his downtown Cincy hotel suite for a couple of scenes) and approached this the same way Meloni did, MARAUDERS might've been even better. But even that wouldn't help the film's tendency to get bogged down in supporting character subplots that go nowhere (why is so much time spent on Mims and his cancer-stricken wife while we know almost nothing about Stockwell or Wells?). It's a page taken straight from the HEAT playbook (Pacino and De Niro's relationships with the women in their lives; Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd's marital problems; Dennis Haysbert's paroled and doomed getaway driver), but it doesn't work in MARAUDERS, which should be a lean, mean 85-minute action thriller but seems padded pushing 110. Schaech isn't a very interesting actor and nobody gives a shit about dickhead Mims and the film's hapless attempts to make him a good guy by showing his tender side with his terminally ill wife. MARAUDERS doesn't even need Bruce Willis. It just needs Chris Meloni glowering, yelling, and getting in some sick burns on all the idiots standing in his way.
