TRAUMA CENTER (US - 2019) Directed by Matt Eskandari. Written by Paul Da Silva. Cast: Nicky Whelan, Bruce Willis, Tito Ortiz, Texas Battle, Catherine Davis, Lala Kent, Sergio Rizzuto, Tyler Jon Olson, Steve Guttenberg, Roman Mitichyan, Jonathan Galanis, Katira Maria, Jaime Irizarry, Leslee Emmett. (R, 87 mins)
A little over two months after the awful 10 MINUTES GONE, here's TRAUMA CENTER, the latest installment in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series. To be fair, and likely much to his chagrin, Willis is noticeably more present in this one, and he's actually in scenes that take place outdoors and, except for one hilarious bit near the end, interacting with other cast members. He's doing that weird "slow talk" routine that he used in half of REPRISAL (until he apparently got bored with it), and the tone of his dialogue sometimes doesn't match that of the actor with whom he's sharing the scene. Sometimes he yells for no reason and his facial expressions of sympathy and concern look more like he's trying to hold in a fart. Hell, maybe he wasn't there and was composited in by a digital effects team, who knows? Since 2011's SET-UP, he's done well over a dozen of these straight-to-VOD walkthroughs--maybe his entire contribution to them is one epic, ongoing deepfake.
Set and shot in Puerto Rico, TRAUMA CENTER "stars" Willis as San Juan cop Lt. Wakes, whose partner Martin (Tyler Jon Olson) is killed after stumbling on a protection racket being run by Pierce (MMA legend Tito Ortiz) and Tull (Texas Battle), a pair of corrupt vice cops. Things get complicated for the dirty cops when the murder is witnessed by Madison (Nicky Whelan of INCONCEIVABLE), a server at a diner who's closing up and taking out the trash. She takes a bullet in the leg during the shootout and is rushed to the hospital, where Wakes correctly assumes the mystery killer or killers will come after her. That they do--not just to kill her, but to extract the bullet from her left leg which was fired from Pierce's service weapon and will be traced back to him after she undergoes surgery the next morning. Wakes manages to stash Madison on the hospital's vacant seventh floor, an infectious disease ward and bacterial research facility that's currently not in use. While Wakes goes off to investigate Martin's murder on his own (translation: Willis in own separate movie for the next hour), Pierce and Tull make their way to the seventh floor where they engage in a game of cat-and-mouse with a surprisingly resourceful Madison, who's learned to take care of herself after losing her mom and raising her depressed, asthmatic teenage sister Emily (Catherine Davis), who was admitted to the hospital earlier in the day after an asthma attack. Gee, is there any chance Pierce and Tull will threaten Emily's life to get to Madison? And is there any doubt that she'll have an asthma attack at the least opportune time?
If TRAUMA CENTER had any imagination at all, it would've done something with the infectious disease angle. Instead, it's just a generally uninspired DIE HARD IN A HOSPITAL scenario, with Bruce Willis as Argyle. Director Matt Eskandari (12 FEET DEEP) does pull off one unexpectedly effective set piece where Madison sets off a fire alarm and is pursued through the seventh floor corridors with only flashing emergency lights intermittently breaking up the darkness, while a pan to a dome mirror shows that Pierce and Tull are almost right behind her facing the opposite direction and neither party realizes the other is right there. The script by Paul Da Silva is rudimentary at best, with barely-there exposition about Madison's deteriorating relationship with her sister, or Battle's Tull grunting "It's time to take it up a notch" when Madison outwits them for the tenth time. There's a bizarre attempt at making some statement about why people move to San Juan that sounds like bad improv from Willis as Madison asks Wakes why he lives in Puerto Rico, to which he wistfully mutters "the same reason everyone comes to the island...runnin' from ghosts." That constitutes character development here, though it sounds less like added layers to the enigma that is Lt. Wakes, and more like Willis using a heavy-handed metaphor to explain his continued coasting in movies like TRAUMA CENTER.
All things considered, TRAUMA CENTER, while not very good, is inoffensively generic and slightly better than what's come to be expected from these Willis paycheck gigs in his day player years. He's in it quite a bit, even when he's off on his own and not interacting with anyone, which probably means he worked as many as 3-4 days instead of his customary 1-2. He somehow seems more invested in this than he was in MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. Only during a climactic showdown between Wakes and Tull does Willis engage in some of his signature contempt for his craft and his colleagues, forcing Eskandari to assemble a fight scene where it's painfully obvious that he and Battle weren't there at the same time. Willis' extended participation here otherwise is noted, but the real story with TRAUMA CENTER is the presence of Steve Guttenberg--yes, that Steve Guttenberg--in a thankless, two-scene supporting role as the hospital's on-duty ER doc. Now 61 and looking a little schlubbier than in his heyday, Guttenberg's commercial viability was a thing of the past long before he joined the SHARKNADO extended universe with a pair of LAVALANTULA movies for Syfy. But the guy was in some of the biggest hits of the 1980s and held his own in scenes with Laurence Olivier in 1978's THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL. TRAUMA CENTER offers him a nothing role that anyone could've played, and required even less time on the set than Willis (Bruce: "Whoa, Stevie, you sure you want that ER doc role, why don't we switch?"), but what's with giving him ninth billing, sandwiching him between Tyler Jon Olson and Roman Mitichyan in the credits? A forgettable VOD action thriller and Steve Guttenberg (POLICE ACADEMY, COCOON, SHORT CIRCUIT, THREE MEN AND A BABY) doesn't even warrant a special "with" or an "and" credit? What the fuck, TRAUMA CENTER?
The hardest-working man in TRAUMA CENTER,
seen here on the set with Bruce Willis.
INCONCEIVABLE (US/UK - 2017) Directed by Jonathan Baker. Written by Chloe King. Cast: Gina Gershon, Faye Dunaway, Nicolas Cage, Nicky Whelan, Natalie Eva Marie, Jonathan Baker, James Van Patten, Sienna Soho Baker, Harlow Bottarini, Ele Bardha, Corrie Danieley, Tyler Jon Olson. (R, 106 mins) A de facto remake of the 2015 Will Ferrell/Kristen Wiig Lifetime thriller A DEADLY ADOPTION as well as 2016's WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS, INCONCEIVABLE is the kind of glossy "(blank) from Hell" thriller that was a multiplex fixture back in the 1990s. INCONCEIVABLE had the chance to be trashy fun, especially with a script penned by Chloe King, daughter of softcore auteur Zalman King (writer of 9 1/2 WEEKS, director of TWO MOON JUNCTION), and a writer on her late dad's erotic Showtime series RED SHOE DIARIES, plus the presence of a couple of slumming Oscar winners, but it takes itself far too seriously. It's the feature directing debut of Jonathan Baker, an L.A. entrepreneur with deep ties to the entertainment industry and, well, don't take it from me. Take it from Baker's IMDb bio that was in no way written by Jonathan Baker:
"On the surface, Jonathan Baker is an eclectic personality, Upon closer examination, however, it comes to light that for years his every endeavor and adventure have all been achieved with the same goal in mind: entertaining people by making their dreams come true. His close involvement with the entertainment industry, as well as his ownership of the #1 rated day spa in the country both served as evidence of that love for realizing dreams."
Yes, it was his love of realizing dreams that led to Baker's defining moment: berating and shoving his then-wife, former Playboy Playmate Victoria Fuller, when they came in second in a race on a 2004 episode of THE AMAZING RACE, an incident that immediately put him in the elite company of universally loathed reality show assholes like THE REAL WORLD's Puck, THE APPRENTICE's Omarosa, and, more recently, the guy on SURVIVOR who outed a transgender contestant. But we're not here to judge Baker's past. We're here to talk about INCONCEIVABLE, and Baker is about as good a director as he is a sport about coming in second.
A thriller that couldn't be any sillier if Wallace Shawn periodically popped up to blurt the title at every ludicrous plot reveal, INCONCEIVABLE focuses on affluent husband-and-wife doctors Brian (Nicolas Cage) and Angela Morgan (Gina Gershon), who have the perfect life in an impossibly huge mansion with five-year-old daughter Cora (Harlow Bottarini), conceived with a donor egg after the couple endured four miscarriages. Angela's friend Linda (Natalie Eva Maria) introduces her to Katie (Nicky Whelan, Cage's co-star in LEFT BEHIND and DOG EAT DOG), a single mom of four-year-old Maddie (Sienna Soho Baker, the director's daughter). The kids become instant best friends, as do the moms, but no one knows Katie's secret (well, one of them anyway), revealed in a prologue: she murdered her abusive husband when Maddie was a baby, and has been living under an alias, moving from town to town since. Angela and Katie are fast friends, with Angela asking Katie to move into the guest house and be Maddie's nanny, but Brian's meddling mother Donna (Faye Dunaway), who lives in another guest house on the property, has a bad feeling about her, and of course, she's right. Brian and Angela decide to have another baby, this time with a surrogate, using the second donor egg harvested from the first pregnancy with Cora, and they ask Linda to carry it. This upsets Katie, with whom Linda is having a secret fling. Katie reveals that her finding Brian and Angela was no coincidence, as she provided the anonymous donor egg for Cora and that she wants to take her and raise her as Maddie's sister. And she also wants to carry the other egg she donated, which means being in a position to step in as the surrogate mother, which necessitates drowning Linda and passing it off as a boating accident. This was not a boat accident!
INCONCEIVABLE is terrible but take the small victories where you can: it actually remembers "I before E except after C." It's is so indebted to the "(blank) from Hell" concept that it's both a Nanny-from-Hell and a Surrogate Mother-from-Hell thriller, but there's no suspense because Baker has no idea how to present an interesting plot reveal. He constantly shows his cards too soon and can't stop tripping over his own leaden feet. Characters constantly drop exposition into casual conversation that feels stilted and awkward (Angela's miscarriages, her past Xanax abuse), and the plot moves in a completely unreal way with characters doing stupid things, as when Brian demands a urine sample to see if Angela's clean after Katie accuses her of pill-popping, and Angela gives the sample to Katie to take to the lab?! Linda's drowning is immediately followed by Angela and Donna having breakfast and Angela saying "Katie was great when Linda was killed in that boating accident." Wait, you mean the drowning that we just saw? Exactly how much time has passed? I'm surprised they didn't get up from the table and have Angela say "Remember when we had breakfast and talked about how great Katie was?" When Katie announces she's moving to Colorado for a job, Angela immediately blurts "You can't just leave! Why don't you move into our guest house? You could also be our part-time nanny," with Brian nodding "Absolutely." People don't talk or make important decisions like this. The characters rely on suppositions and assumptions (Angela's phone call to the egg donor facility is a howler), and of course, Brian's younger brother Barry works in a DNA lab and comes through in the end with a key piece of evidence to save the day. It should go without saying that Barry is played by...you guessed it...Jonathan Baker.
It's nice to see Gershon getting a leading role, but she's better than this uninspired garbage. Academy Award-winner Dunaway, following her triumphant appearance in THE BYE BYE MAN, is thoroughly wasted and only has a few brief scenes, despite her second billing. And it's INCONCEIVABLE how Nic Cage got to here, exactly 20 years to the week that the classic FACE/OFF was unleashed in theaters: third-billed in a vanity project by an infamous reality show douchebag. Cage is an Oscar-winning actor who, at some point, made the conscious decision to play the thankless Matt McCoy role in a belated HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE ripoff 35 years into his career. Cage has one "Cage" moment near the end, but he's on total autopilot here, visibly not giving the slightest whiff of a shit playing the obligatory clueless husband who has no idea what's going on in his own mansion. It's also unclear what kind of a doctor he is, since he's never seen leaving the house or arriving home with a bag or any kind of files indicating that he's employed, and is almost always seen wearing jeans and a leather jacket. I'm willing to bet that Baker wanted to play Brian, but someone, whether it was Lionsgate, Grindstone, Emmett/Furla, or any of the six production companies and 25 credited producers involved other than his own "Baker Entertainment Group," vetoed that and insisted on someone notable who could actually act, or once had acted. Baker is just dreadful in his scenes as Barry, and as a director, he's a great day spa owner. None of that stops the auteur from showing off the least humble production company logo ever, one that's shockingly not accompanied by an image of a smiling Baker with a "ting" gleaming off of his teeth. He also extends his personal gratitude to none other than Warren Beatty in the closing credits. And Warren thought the Best Picture debacle at the Oscars would be his biggest movie-related embarrassment of the year?
