On Blu-ray/DVD/VOD: FORCE OF NATURE (2020) and THE LEGION (2020)

FORCE OF NATURE
(US - 2020)

There'll no doubt be a knee-jerk, cancel-culture reaction among some to trash FORCE OF NATURE sight unseen just because they object to Mel Gibson being employed. But if you take the time to actually watch it, you'll find so many more valid reasons to hate it. An utterly, depressingly perfunctory Lionsgate/Grindstone DTV time-waster, FORCE OF NATURE is directed by Michael Polish who, with his twin brother Mark, formed the once-promising Polish Brothers team behind the 1999 cult indie hit TWIN FALLS IDAHO. That's a generation ago at this point, and after 2003's higher-profile NORTHFORK flopped, the brothers never really regained their momentum. Michael is flying solo here in hired-gun mode for this Puerto Rico-shot high-rise mayhem/disaster movie hybrid set during a Category 5 hurricane bearing down on San Juan (think THE RAID: REDEMPTION meets THE HURRICANE HEIST). Burned-out, suicidal cop Cardillo (Emile Hirsch) and rookie partner Pena (Stephanie Cayo) are sent to an apartment complex to force two stubborn residents to evacuate: aging German Bergkamp (Jorge Luis Ramos) and terminally ill retired cop Ray (Gibson), whose doctor daughter Troy (Kate Bosworth, Polish's wife) is desperately trying to get him to the hospital so he doesn't miss a dialysis treatment. Ray is a surly pain in the ass suffering from kidney and lung issues with some bonus colitis, and fears that if he goes in the hospital, he won't come out. But there's a bigger issue at hand: psycho criminal John the Baptist (David Zayas) and his crew are made aware of a Van Gogh painting worth $55 million that's in one of the units of the building, and with everyone presumably evacuated, all they need to do is go through each unit to find it. But they need to get rid of the unexpected witnesses, and thus begins a "survive the night" scenario as two separated groups--one with Cardillo, Troy, Bergkamp and tenant Griffin (Will Catlett) and the other Ray and Pena--are forced to take on a ruthless, trigger-happy John the Baptist as the hurricane rages around them.

This is serviceable B-movie material handled in the dumbest and least-inspired, DIPSHIT KEY LARGO way possible. Polish never really establishes the layout of the apartment complex, so it's hard to tell where anyone is in relation to others. Introduced taking an epic, gun-pointed-at-his-own-head Decompression Shower (© David James Keaton), Cardillo's baggage involves his accidentally shooting his ex-girlfriend and fellow cop back in NYC, which sent him on a downward spiral that landed him in San Juan, and somehow, the whole city knows about it ("How do you know about that?" he asks John the Baptist, who replies "I'm John the Baptist...I know everything!"). Griffin has a cop-hating black panther (!) locked up in a room in his apartment (!!), so you know there's no way that won't come into play at some point, and rest assured, Cory Miller's script makes it happen in the most idiotic way possible. Third-billed Gibson is on total Bruce Willis duty and really isn't in it all that much--in fact, Willis was set to play Ray until he backed out and Gibson replaced him. Imagine if you can an installment of Lionsgate/Grindstone's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series that Willis deemed unworthy of his time. Cancellation-era Gibson has done some fine work in under-the-radar gems like BLOOD FATHER and DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE, but he's just phoning it in here, playing Ray as an older, near-death variation of the plays-by-his-own rules Riggs from LETHAL WEAPON. I can deal with Gibson being an asshole anger management case offscreen while still respecting his work onscreen. But he's gotta try harder than FORCE OF NATURE. (R, 91 mins)


THE LEGION
(US/Spain - 2020)

After a half-dozen production company logos, you're barely a minute into THE LEGION when you hear Oscar-nominated actor Mickey Rourke mispronounce "Caligula" as "Ca-lig-lee-uh" and you know you're in for something special. Rourke seems hellbent on squandering whatever reputation he has remaining with his one-day-on-the-set clockpunch of an appearance in this laughably cheap, incompetently-made melodrama set in 62 AD. As a disgruntled general named Corbulo, Rourke--with an eye patch, highlighted hair, Lee Press-On Nails, and enough mascara on his visible eye to make him the next face of L'Oreal (because he's worth it)--spends almost all of his screen time alone, against an obvious greenscreen, mumbling and ranting at a bust of Nero using curiously present-day vernacular, whether it's dropping F-bombs or complaining about a rival's "grubby little hands." Corbulo is peeved that Nero chose another general, Paetus (Joaquim de Almeida), to lead Roman troops into Parthia, where they've been surrounded on all sides by enemy forces and will likely die of starvation and exposure if they aren't killed first. Paetus and his adviser Marcus (Vladimir Kulich) decide to send soldier Noreno (Lee Partridge) on a foreboding mission across treacherous terrain to get to Corbulo and beg him to marshal his troops to rescue the Roman forces.

If that sounds a little like 1917 by way of ancient Rome, you're not far off, aside from the fact that THE LEGION makes Uwe Boll look like Cecil B. DeMille, is saddled with a pitifully low budget, and can almost muster a cast of tens despite having 41 credited producers. Most of the film is dedicated to Noreno running, running, and running some more, periodically stopping to battle a Parthian soldier he might encounter or rescue a young woman (Marta Castellvi) from being raped (she repays the favor by firing an arrow into the chest of a Parthian soldier who's attacking Noreno). He does some soul searching with an aging hermit named Saul (Bosco Hogan) and finally makes it to Corbulo's stronghold, where his arrival is announced and is met with Mickey Rourke mumbling, in the parlance of 62 AD, "A messenger? Where the fuck is he?" The big climax is a long, meandering discussion between Corbulo and his mistress Amiriah (Bai Ling), who has to talk him off the ledge and set him straight after the diva general refuses to help Paetus. Delivering performances that'll make you appreciate the dedication and pride that Steven Seagal takes in his craft, Rourke and Ling audibly flub lines and mispronounce words to the point that they might just be deliberately fucking with director Jose Magan, a veteran Spanish producer making his debut behind the camera (represented by the gaffe-afflicted credit "Directed Jose Magan"). Other than Xavier Gens' Lovecraftian COLD SKIN, Magan is hardly a producer of repute, having bankrolled the entirety of the unwatchable 2001-2006 output of Spanish non-auteur Maria Lidon, aka "Luna" (STRANDED, THE LIFE, MOSCOW ZERO). THE LEGION is bad enough that it almost feels like another craptacular Luna project, but Magan seems awfully proud of it: he's also credited with the story, producer, executive producer, line producer, casting director, post-production coordinator, and "financial services." So I guess there's only 38 producers if you count the three times Magan credits himself. (R, 96 mins)

In Theaters: THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD (2017)

THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD
(US/China - 2017)

Directed by Patrick Hughes. Written by Tom O'Connor. Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek, Elodie Yung, Joaquim de Almeida, Richard E. Grant, Kirsty Mitchell, Sam Hazeldine, Rod Hallett, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Tine Joustra, Michael Gor, Barry Atsma, Tsuwayuke Saotome, Josephine De La Baume. (R, 118 mins)

THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD tries to be a throwback to the ballbusting buddy/cop/action movies of the '80s, and its attempts to be 2017's answer to 48 HRS or MIDNIGHT RUN succeeds about 60% of the time. It's a film that gets by almost solely by riffing on the onscreen personas of its two stars, working from a script by Tom O'Connor (whose only previous writing credit is 2012's instantly forgotten Josh Duhamel/Bruce Willis VOD actioner FIRE WITH FIRE) that was floating around Hollywood for several years. That script has obviously been given some extensive polishing to refashion it for both a post-DEADPOOL Ryan Reynolds and the venerable Samuel L. Jackson, cast radically against type as motherfuckin' Samuel L. Jackson. The two stars aren't quite Nick Nolte & Eddie Murphy or Robert De Niro & Charles Grodin, but they might've been if in better hands. Despite A-list actors and location shooting all over Europe, this is still a Millennium/NuImage production, which means most of the money went to the cast and you're gonna get that same backlot at Avi Lerner's Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria that's been in countless DTV efforts by the Cannon cover band over the years, and that the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX will do their part by delivering the least convincing CGI explosions and greenscreen work that Lerner and 31 other credited producers can look at and shrug "Eh, fuck it...it's good enough." Many of the exterior shots that aren't marred by atrocious greenscreen are drenched in a gauzy, smudgy Barbara Walters lens filter. Lerner got a pair of box-office draws with Reynolds and Jackson, but from a filmmaking standpoint, he still approached THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD as if it starred Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White being directed by Isaac Florentine (why isn't he directing this, by the way?). The film does the bare minimum to get by, and it's damn lucky that it's got Reynolds and Jackson to move it along, because without them, this would've gone straight to Redbox.

Still haunted by a botched job where a client was shot in the head on his watch, AAA-rated security contractor Michael Bryce (Reynolds) has hit bottom. He now takes easy gigs guarding London's low-level drug smugglers and assorted corporate scumbags, his car still smells like ass weeks after pellets of cocaine exploded in a client's rectum, and he's still pining for his French Interpol agent ex Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung). Amelia has just been assigned to lead the security detail taking incarcerated assassin Darius Kincaid (Jackson) from London to the International Court at the Hague, where he's set to testify against genocidal former Belarus dictator Vlasislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman), who hired Kincaid for some past jobs. Of course, Amelia's boss Jean Foucher (Joaquim de Almeida) is a mole secretly on Dukhovich's payroll--a non-spoiler that's obvious the moment you see the character is played by Joaquim de Almeida--and the dictator's minions ambush the transport convoy, killing everyone but Kincaid and Amelia. With no other options and with Kincaid needing to be in The Hague in 24 hours, Amelia heads to a safe house and calls Bryce, who knows Kincaid from the assassin's 28 attempts on his life while in the line of duty protecting a client. Of course, they're now on the run throughout Europe, with Dukhovich's goons in hot pursuit trying to eliminate the bickering bromancers, who now have to set aside their differences and work together to get to The Hague...if they don't kill each other first!

THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD is so beholden to formula that at one point, Amelia actually tells the prosecutor "The only way Bryce and Kincaid don't make it is if they kill each other first." There's no shortage of car chases and shootouts and director Patrick Hughes (the lackluster THE EXPENDABLES 3) keeps things moving briskly even if the film is 20 minutes too long. Oldman is criminally underused as the villain and Salma Hayek has even less to do as Kincaid's equally foul-mouthed wife, who's in a Dutch prison and will be released if Kincaid testifies. You can definitely see the DEADPOOL influence in the incongruous use of '80s and '90s songs, like Lionel Richie's "Hello" during a flashback to a violent bar brawl where Kincaid met his wife, or another flashback to Bryce and Amelia's meet-cute at a funeral shootout set to Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is." Or Bryce drowning out Kincaid's blues singing with his own a cappella take on Ace of Base's "The Sign." Like DEADPOOL, there's no joke there other than "Hey, these were huge hit singles 25 or 30 years ago, so just recognizing them should be instantly hysterical." But Reynolds and Jackson (who's really having a blast here) are a terrific team and when they're busting chops and working off one another, THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD really comes alive with more than its share of quotable dialogue ("This man has single-handedly ruined the word 'motherfucker'") and laugh-out-loud gags (a car chase montage coming to abrupt halt in seconds thanks to the airbags). In the hands of someone like Shane Black, THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD could've been right up there with a next generation mismatched buddy/cop classic like KISS KISS BANG BANG. Obviously constrained by what he's been given to work with by his producers, Hughes resorts to quick-cut, shaky-cam action scenes and his attempt to pull off the illusion of a long, single-take fight scene is exposed by the first of several obvious cuts about four seconds into the sequence. This is an ugly cheap-looking film in need of some serious quality control on the tech side, but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining. It's a must-see for Reynolds and Jackson fans, and it'll be in constant rotation on cable and streaming until the end of time, but the presence of those two big names are probably the exact reason the producers were totally cool with cutting corners everywhere else.

On DVD/Blu-ray: FRANKENSTEIN (2016) and DIABLO (2016)

FRANKENSTEIN
(Germany/US - 2016)

Bernard Rose's ongoing freefall into absolute irrelevance continues with this aggressively awful, straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray modern updating of Mary Shelley's classic novel, co-produced by Avi Lerner and Cannon cover band NuImage. Rose, who established his horror bona fides with 1989's PAPERHOUSE and 1992's CANDYMAN, hasn't made a good film since the late '90s (his most recent efforts include the found-footage SX_TAPE and the atrocious Paganini biopic THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST) and for a while, his take on FRANKENSTEIN is promising enough that it starts looking very much like a comeback. Accordingly, since everything Rose has touched for nearly the last 20 years turns to shit, so goes FRANKENSTEIN. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the film finds Victor Frankenstein (Danny Huston) and his wife Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss) conducting top-secret experiments at a high-tech research facility. Using digital technology, they've created "Adam" (Xavier Samuel), who's essentially a baby in the body of an adult. Elizabeth bottle-feeds him and Adam learns to say "Mama," but the experiment is deemed a failure when boils start developing all over his body. An attempt at euthanizing him fails when the presumed-dead Adam jerks awake as his skull is being sawed open. He escapes from the facility and creates havoc all over Los Angeles, with the strength of ten men and seemingly impervious to bullets. When he's arrested and the cops find Elizabeth's work ID in Adam's possession, they call her in but Adam goes berserk when she claims to have never seen him before. Rejected by his "mother," the increasingly monstrous-looking Adam escapes police custody and is befriended by homeless, guitar-strumming blind man Eddie (Rose's CANDYMAN star Tony Todd), who dubs him "Monster" and hooks him up with Wanda (Maya Erskine), an area streetwalker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him to a fleabag motel and doesn't seem to mind that he's starting to resemble The Toxic Avenger.

Until Adam escapes from Frankenstein's research lab, FRANKENSTEIN is actually OK. Samuel's performance was credible and there seemed to be enough clever ideas that this was shaping up to be a promising reinterpretation and Rose's best film in a long time (particularly memorable is a ghoulishly macabre bit where Adam gets the upper hand on the Frankenstein associate--named Dr. Pretorius, of course--conducting his autopsy). But once Adam is out of the lab and on the streets, FRANKENSTEIN just crashes and burns on an almost LEGION level. It's not really conveyed in a proper time element how Adam goes from having the cognitive and motor skills of an infant to learning how to shower, being coordinated enough to take on a couple of gang members, and eventually programming a GPS on a dead hooker's smart phone to find out where the Frankensteins live, possibly the dumbest tech-based plot development in a horror movie since Simon Callow faxed his own ejaculate in 2009's unwatchable CROWLEY. Approaching FRANKENSTEIN with the apparent goal of turning it into MARY SHELLEY'S TIME OUT OF MIND, the second half of the film focuses on the friendship between Adam and Eddie, in a tired and obvious revamping of the blind hermit segment in James Whale's THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, moved to the mean streets of L.A.  Rose throws in embarrassingly ham-fisted commentary on bad L.A. cops (one is played an overacting Jeff Hilliard in the world's worst tribute to Bill Paxton-as-Hudson-in-ALIENS), and even resorts to a philosophical Eddie invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "Free at last!" in reference to Adam. Rest assured, Rose is taking this completely seriously, but you may be distracted when your mind wanders off to questions like "Who thought this was a good idea?" and "Does this take place in a world where Frankenstein movies have never existed?" and "At what point do Rose's loved ones stage an intervention?"  He tweaks elements of both the novel and the early FRANKENSTEIN films that starred Boris Karloff, and yes, there's even a climactic funeral pyre, where CGI flames engulf both the monster and what's left of Rose's credibility as a filmmaker. (R, 90 mins)



DIABLO
(US - 2016)

Scott Eastwood looks and sounds a lot like his legendary dad Clint, and that was probably all the makers of DIABLO felt they needed to make it work. It also borrows core ideas from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and UNFORGIVEN and enough of a particular 1973 western that one could sarcastically dub this HIGH PLAINS POSEUR. The setting is Colorado in 1872, and Eastwood is Jackson, a Civil War vet whose farm is set ablaze by a gang of Mexicans who take off with his new bride Alexsandra (Camilla Belle). Following the trail south to Mexico, Jackson sets off on a vigilante mission to rescue his wife and kill her abductors. He's hindered in his efforts by the mysterious Ezra (THE HATEFUL EIGHT's Walton Goggins), an overtly Mephistophelian figure who keeps appearing on the trail saying things like "Your soul is the toll," and "You're on my road, you pay my price." It's some pretty obvious soul-sellling, "Road to Hell" symbolism that probably seems like deep stuff to screenwriter Carlos De Los Rios, whose credits include several Asylum mockbusters like THE DA VINCI TREASURE and PIRATES OF TREASURE ISLAND. Unfortunately, De Los Rios and director Lawrence Roeck (who has a tenuous connection to Clint; he was a camera operator on THE EASTWOOD FACTOR, one of former Time film critic and full-time Clint BFF Richard Schickel's shamelessly slurping documentaries on the iconic actor) aren't done yet, as DIABLO goes along on an unspectacular but inoffensive path until about 50 minutes in, with a total bullshit plot twist that's the hoariest cliche this side of waking up and finding that it was all a dream. You can't even hint at what it involves without completely giving it away, but let's say the twist is similar to a certain beloved 1999 film with an unreliable narrator. The twist completely derails Eastwood's performance which, while not great, was decent enough to that point to carry a small, low-key western that inexplicably feels the need to switch gears and become a horror movie midway though. There's some really beautiful cinematography by the veteran Dean Cundey and brief appearances by jobbing pros like Danny Glover, Adam Beach, and Joaquim de Almeida, but by the time the asinine finale rolls around, DIABLO only succeeds in shooting itself in the foot. (R, 83 mins)