On Blu-ray/DVD: JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT (2019) and LINE OF DUTY (2019)

JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT
(US - 2019)

With the exception of the topical 2011 thriller RED STATE, Kevin Smith's last decade of departures has found the '90s indie icon struggling to find his mojo. Yes, he has his podcast and his various online endeavors that keep his loyal fan base sticking around, but the movies have been garbage. It's little wonder that he finally saw fit to go the "give 'em what they want" route by resurrecting his two biggest fan favorite characters with JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT, but the resulting film wasn't made by the Kevin Smith who gave us CLERKS and MALLRATS. It was made by the Kevin Smith who gave us TUSK and YOGA HOSERS. Smith's been away from the View Askewniverse since 2006's CLERKS II and it's barely five minutes into REBOOT before you're wishing he'd made that sabbatical a little longer. There was some potential here for insightful meta commentary on the state of movies, franchises, fan conventions, or any other target ripe for satire, but the lazy and aggressively unfunny REBOOT is content to settle for a series of references straight from the Friedberg/Seltzer comedy school, where the reference is the joke--references to other movies (Jason Mewes' Jay is doing a SILENCE OF THE LAMBS junk-tuck in the opening scene in a gag recycled from CLERKS II; when Smith's Silent Bob finally opens his mouth, it's to recite Alec Baldwin's GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS speech to attendees at a Klan rally, where the Grand Wizard invokes "Can you dig it?" from THE WARRIORS), callbacks to earlier Smith movies (Ben Affleck shows up for a positively Bruce Willis-ian cameo as his CHASING AMY character, in a scene that's so bad at concealing the fact that he and Mewes weren't there at the same time that its clumsy editing almost has to be intentional), and would-be sick burns on Smith's own movies (COP OUT is a recurring target). But the endless self-deprecation feels less like genuine ribbing at his own expense and more like Smith pre-emptively shrugging "Hey, yeah, I know this whole thing is just stupid bullshit, but whatever." Everyone's default mode here is to mug shamelessly, and as a result, the film makes a lot of noise, but none of that noise is the sound of laughter.

And the sad thing is, old-school Kevin Smith could've done something with the basic idea of JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT. After getting busted for running an illegal weed dispensary inside a fake chicken sandwich joint (called--wait for it--Cock Smoker) inside the old RST Video next to the Quick Stop, Jay and Silent Bob end up in court. It's there that conniving lawyer Brandon St. Randy (Justin Long) gets them to sign over the rights to their names and likenesses to Saban Films (also REBOOT's distributor), who now own the "Bluntman and Chronic" comic book franchise and are rebooting the nearly two-decade-old cult superhero comedy BLUNTMAN AND CHRONIC (as seen in 2001's JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK) as the dark and grim BLUNTMAN V CHRONIC, to be directed by "Hollywood hack" Kevin Smith (playing himself in a dual role). Now, in what's essentially a reboot of STRIKE BACK, REBOOT has the pair heading off to "Chronic Con" in  Hollywood to stop Kevin Smith from making the reboot. Along the way, they end up meeting Millennium "Milly" Faulken (Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith), the daughter Jay never knew he had with STRIKE BACK's Justice Faulken (Shannon Elizabeth), taking her and her friends (including Aparna Brielle as a girl in a hijab named "Jihad") along for the trip.

Smith still has a ton of buds in the View Askewniverse, so there's endless cameos, none of them even remotely amusing: Craig Robinson as "Judge Jerry N. Executioner," and Joe Manganiello as his bailiff; Brian O'Halloran as Dante; Jason Lee as Brodie; Joey Lauren Adams as Alyssa; Chris Hemsworth as a hologram of himself; Fred Armisen in the longest set-up possible for a thudding punchline to an unfunny joke about Tater Tots for teenage girls called "Hater Totz"; Keith Coogan, Jason Biggs, and James Van Der Beek as themselves; Rosario Dawson as Justice's wife; Smith's wife Jennifer Schwalbach as a fast-food manager who seduces Silent Bob in the restroom; Chris Jericho as the KKK Grand Wizard; Val Kilmer as the new Bluntman opposite Melissa Benoist as a female Chronic, with Tommy Chong as their butler Alfred; Method Man and Redman as their HOW HIGH characters; and a tired-looking Matt Damon in a pointless appearance as Loki from DOGMA. What? No Johnny Depp as TUSK and YOGA HOSERS' Guy LaPointe? Is there even a point in reviewing something like this? Like Rob Zombie, the attendance is dwindling but the dutiful die-hards will always be there, and like Zombie, Smith has reached the "self-indulgent home movie" phase of his career. And if Saban Films had any faith in REBOOT at all, they would've given it a full-fledged theatrical release instead of relegating it to a two-night Fathom Events screening last fall before sending it to Blu-ray. It's a complete waste of time and talent, but if nothing else, I guess COP OUT's standing just got a little higher in the Smith filmography. (R, 105 mins)



LINE OF DUTY
(US/UK/Germany - 2019)

Not to be confused with the recent CROWN VIC, another day-in-the-life cop movie, LINE OF DUTY is an initially intriguing thriller that doesn't take long devolve into an outright howler. Veteran cop Frank Penny (Aaron Eckhart, also one of 32 credited producers) is lounging outside a carryout goofing off with a neighborhood kid when all hell breaks loose over the radio. A sting operation overseen by police chief Tom Volk (Giancarlo Esposito) has gone to shit nearby when the target flees and sends the cops on a frantic chase. Despite orders to stand down and not engage, Penny pursues him on foot in an impressively long sequence that takes up nearly 15 minutes of screen time. Penny is forced to shoot when the perp pulls a gun on him, and only then does he realize why there was an order to stand down: the man he just killed is Max Keller (James Hutchison), who has kidnapped Volk's 11-year-old daughter Claudia (Nishelle Williams) and is the only person who knew where she's being held. Disgraced already and with a rep as a "cowboy" after a past incident where Volk was forced to bust him down from detective to patrolman, Penny isn't about to let a little thing like "turn in your weapon and go straight downtown to IA" deter him from setting things right. And joining him is a sentient compilation of woke hot takes in the form of Ava Brooks (MAD MAX: FURY ROAD's Courtney Eaton), a snarky and incredibly smug vlogger for the online outfit "Media for the People," who spends most of her time saying things like "Whatever goes out is what my camera sees! Unfiltered!" while bitching about corporations and "sheeple." Ava ends up tagging along and livestreaming the entire pursuit after Penny figures out that Claudia is being held in an plexiglass box that will be completely filled with water in 64 minutes, tearing apart Los Angeles (played here by Birmingham, AL) to find her before it's too late.

Directed by Steven C. Miller, who's helmed numerous installments in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, LINE OF DUTY works until it becomes a Penny/Ava buddy movie, where he tries to stay focused on the task at hand while she keeps demonstrating how little she knows about the world--and actual news reporting--usually ending every statement with "Just sayin.'" There's a lot of sanctimonious hectoring from Penny about letting cops do their job and how the media just "spins the truth into whatever sells." It almost turns into BLUE LIVES MATTER: THE MOVIE, as Penny is shown tossing out every section of his morning paper except the sports page, a facile way of showing he doesn't take sides politically, and then we see him talking about basketball with a young black kid, so you know he isn't one of those racist cops. But then the main villain is introduced in the form of Max's meth-head brother Dean (Ben McKenzie), who crashes his SUV in the middle of a busy downtown area and starts mowing down cops HEAT-style in his search for Penny, who the whole city now knows was the cop who pulled the trigger on Max thanks to Ava's borderline irresponsible livestream. LINE OF DUTY is one of those films where a character like Dean can go on a massive rampage of death and destruction and all of the cops in the city seem to vanish into thin air (also, it completely forgets about the "real time" element as all of this goes down in what's only supposed to be an hour). From then on, the already far-fetched film turns unintentionally hilarious, culminating in a ridiculous, horseshit feel-good climax that truly has to be seen to be believed.

Eckhart somehow manages to keep a straight face throughout, but the terribly-written script by Jeremy Drysdale (whose only other feature credit is the 2004 Johnny Knoxville vehicle GRAND THEFT PARSONS) seems to think it's making salient points and blow-the-doors-off revelations about the media and its perception of cops, but it's all trite platitudes and cardboard cutout characterization. Eaton's indescribably grating performance is really hard to take, but there's nothing that anyone could've done when stuck with the kind of cipher she's playing (cue the pop culture references with the discovery of a homemade bomb in Dean's house, when she has time to sigh-quip "Texas Chainsaw MacGyvers!" prompting Penny to call bullshit on her earlier "I don't even own a TV!" posturing). And don't miss Dina Meyer as a local TV news producer strutting around the station's control room emphatically barking orders like "Let's get our Eye in the Sky over there!" Wouldn't she just say "chopper?" It's like a guitarist friend of mine complaining a few years ago about Denis Leary's short-lived series SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL, when Leary's rock star character would refer to his guitar as an "axe," like telling someone "Hand me my axe." "I've been in bands for 30 years," my friend said. "And nobody in a band calls it an 'axe.'" No one in this movie talks like a real person. Eaton's character, in particular, is a hysterically overwrought version of what the "OK, Boomer" crowd imagines a pushy and ambitious young "new media" journalist must be like. Filled with ludicrous dialogue, absurd plot machinations, and the usual bush-league CGI fire and car flips, LINE OF DUTY still isn't the worst Steven C. Miller movie, but it's definitely the funniest. (R, 99 mins)

On Blu-ray/DVD: ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES (2018); CHINA SALESMAN (2018); and THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 (2018)

ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES
(US/China/UK - 2018)

2013's ESCAPE PLAN was an enjoyable prison-break pairing of aging '80s action icons Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger that failed to generate much interest and flopped at the box office. Like some other underperformers, it proved to be a huge hit in China, which explains the existence of the needlessly convoluted, partially Chinese-financed ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES, the first of two sequels shot back-to-back for DTV release in the States and a theatrical rollout in Asia. Schwarzenegger is out and top-billed Stallone is back, albeit in largely a supporting role, but the nominal lead is popular Chinese actor and singer Huang Xiaoming as Shu, the newest member of security expert Ray Breslin's (Stallone) Atlanta-based team. After a botched extraction from a Chechen prison results in the death of a hostage, Breslin fires one of his men, Kimbral (Wes Chatham), for deviating from their set routine. A year later, Shu is in Thailand visiting his tech mogul cousin Yusheng Ma (Chen Tang) when both are abducted and thrown into Hades, a super high-tech prison nine stories underground that holds regular fighting showdowns (that's original) in "The Zoo," where the victor earns time in "The Sanctuary," a room with virtual reality imagery that provides a brief respite for the prisoners. Jake (Jesse Metcalfe), another Breslin staffer, goes rogue and tries to investigate Shu's disappearance on his own only to end up in Hades himself, where he and Shu encounter an incarcerated Kimbral. It then becomes clear--to them but perhaps not to the viewer--that it's all a set-up against Breslin as revenge for him escaping from "The Tomb" in the previous film, which means one thing: Breslin must do what he does best and get himself thrown into Hades, essentially breaking in to find a way to get his guys out.

Though Stallone is playing the same character, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson is back as his right-hand man Hush, and co-writer Miles Chapman also returns, ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES seems like it takes place in a different world than its predecessor. It's got such heavy futuristic sci-fi leanings that it could almost pass as a FORTRESS or CUBE reboot, and at the rate this franchise is going, ESCAPE PLAN 3 could very well be set in space. Director Steven C. Miller, who's helmed several chapters of Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, churned this out in an undistinguished fashion, with constantly jittery cinematography and motion-sickness inducing shaky-cam in the action scenes, and some of the most unacceptably shoddy CGI in recent memory (a couple of iPhone-app-level explosions and Stallone administering a CGI neckbreak that's just atrocious). Huang is a dull hero, though to his credit, he's not acting in his first language. Half-asleep and sporting a terrible rug, Stallone is largely relegated to the sideline, almost-but-not-quite-Willis-style (Breslin actually leaves his office), until he ends up in Hades about an hour in and more or less becomes the focus. Dave Bautista has little to do but manages a couple of laughs as a fixer colleague of Breslin's who gathers intel for their search for Shu, strong-arming assistance from a hacker played by Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz (and speaking of pointless cameos, Atlanta Falcons RB Devonta Freeman can briefly be glimpsed as a Hades inmate). ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES is lazy, cheap-looking, and laughably cliched, right down to its (ostensibly) chief villain, evil warden "The Zookeeper," played by Titus Welliver. A reliable ringer when it comes to character roles, a glowering Welliver looks like he's in physical pain being forced to gravely intone lines like "I know everything about my animals...I'm the Zookeeper," while one inmate helpfully waxes poetic with "That's why they call it The Zoo...we're all animals here...survival of the fittest." Between these hastily-shot sequels that were only made to satisfy the demand of the Asian market and the apparently ill-advised direction CREED 2 seems to be headed from the sound of things (why is Ivan Drago back?), it looks like Stallone is completely squandering the serious cred he got from that CREED Oscar nomination. Had he won it like he should have, we might've been spared ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES. Or at least Miller could've rewritten the script to keep Breslin completely confined to his office so Bruce Willis could've stepped in and taken over the role. (R, 93 mins)


CHINA SALESMAN
(China - 2017; US release 2018)

It's pretty clear from the moment CHINA SALESMAN begins that it's gonna be something special. There's an opening certification stating that it's commissioned by the Chinese government, one of the 16 (!) production companies is represented by a typo ("Gloden" God Video & Culture), there's 72 (!!) credited producers, and former action star and current sleeper agent Steven Seagal is listed as "Steve Segal" in the opening credits. A $20 million epic that tanked in China a year ago, CHINA SALESMAN was picked up for the US by Cleopatra Entertainment, the company that gave us the Kazakh shitshow DIAMOND CARTEL, and prominently features Seagal and Mike Tyson in its advertising, making it a veritable Who's Who of #MeToo. But, like ESCAPE PLAN 2, the Hollywood guest stars have relatively minor roles, with the focus on Li Dongxue as Yan Jian, an ambitious representative from Chinese tech company DH Telecom, who's in Uganda trying to negotiate a lucrative contract to establish 3G wireless communication at newly-constructed cell phone towers in the civil war-torn country. Pretty scintillating stuff, with a lot of screen time devoted to captivating meetings and boardroom backstabbing as Yan Jian and his associate Ruan Ling (Li Ai) are in constant danger of being railroaded by duplicitous Eurotrash shitbag Michael Duchamp (Clovis Fouin), who's also trying to close the deal for his company and seems to be on the good side of Susanna (Janicke Askevold), the head of the independent committee charged with deciding the victor in the 3G bidding war. But Susanna eventually sides with Yan Jian, who's heroically depicted as the only person who can save Uganda, right down to a patently ridiculous scene where he risks life and limb to plant a Chinese flag, which he and Susanna then passionately wave as they drive past cheering Ugandan soldiers.

Tyson, who relooped his dialogue but still can't match his own lip movements, plays Kabbah, a religious mercenary from an unnamed African country who ends up as a flunky for Duchamp. Seagal has little more than a cameo as Lauder, an expat bar owner ("Of all the gin joints in the world...") and arms dealer on the side who, for some reason, has a framed action still of Steven Seagal on his desk. CHINA SALESMAN shows its only signs of life in the first ten minutes during an out-of-nowhere bar brawl between Tyson and Seagal's double, which starts when Kabbah refuses a drink for religious reasons, prompting Lauder to have one of his goons piss in a mug and try to force him to drink it. There's an admittedly amusing moment when Seagal('s double) flicks Tyson's ear in a way that has to be an Evander Holyfield dig, but what perfectly caps the scene is an enraged Kabbah shouting "You serve me pee...YOU DIE!" Beyond that, CHINA SALESMAN is an oppressively overlong bore, filled with the kind of crummy greenscreen and CGI that only Chinese visual effects teams can pull off, and populated by actors so stiff and uncomfortable with English (even Tyson) that Seagal ends up looking like a world-class orator by default. (Unrated, 111 mins)

THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614
(US - 2018)

It's rare that you encounter a movie that has no reason to exist. One of the most self-defeating films of 2018, THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 initially appears to be a B-grade, Redbox-ready take on HELL OR HIGH WATER by way of the Coen Bros., with nitwit sheriff's deputies Jim Doyle (FREAKS AND GEEKS' Martin Starr) and Thurman Hayford (Jake McDorman of CBS' LIMITLESS spinoff) idling their days away in the sleepy and sparsely-populated rural town of Shandaken in upstate New York in the late 1960s. They have little to do but play cops & robbers in the woods and get on-the-house pie at the local diner, and without a single arrest in the last year, the stern, no-nonsense sheriff (Ron Perlman) comes down from Albany to fire them. But they find a way to regain their jobs when they get word of an escaped convict known only as Prisoner 614 (George Sample III) on foot and headed their way. They hike deep into the woods--idiotically wasting all their bullets in a pissing contest where neither of them can shoot a beer can at ten paces--finding 614 and taking him into custody. 614 is wanted for killing a deputy from a neighboring county, but insists he's innocent and that the deputy died of a heart attack, and as time goes on, Jim and Thurman believe him. Once they get back to Shandaken, they can't convince the sheriff, even with a sworn statement from a witness that the obese deputy had a heart attack while 614 was simply standing near him. Their actions get Jim and Thurman rehired, but then they risk it all by going against the sheriff and aiding and abetting a fugitive to get 614 to freedom in Canada.

It's hard telling who this movie is even for. Nothing sums up its utter futility like having a character unknowingly guzzle Ipecac in a set-up for what must be a showstopping comedic projectile vomiting set piece, but then it has that very character drop dead of a heart attack before the Ipecac kicks in. Is that like making a porno where two people are about to fuck and then just watch TV? THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 subverts your expectations to the point where the entire movie just feels like one long dick move. Is it a comedy without laughs or a thriller without suspense? And is it that way by design? Starr and McDornan seem like they'll be playing affable goofballs but then just seem to wander aimlessly through the movie with no real character arcs or progression, while Sample has even less to do, even when writer/director Zach Golden throws in a cursory mention of the charges against him being racially-motivated. Perlman pops up here and there to slow burn at the deputies and basically be "Ron Perlman," but Golden doesn't seem to know what kind of movie he was trying to make, so he plays it too safe and makes what amounts to a movie about nothing that goes nowhere. The period detail is atrocious, and you can only gauge that it's 1967 or thereabouts from Jim mentioning that he recently saw COOL HAND LUKE (you should probably do the same). There's a few old cars and people chain-smoking indoors, but no one looks or sounds like they're in the late '60s. Speaking of sounds, if this is upstate New York in the Catskills, why is everyone breaking out overbaked Southern drawls like they're auditioning for a community theater version of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT? (PG-13, 97 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: FIRST KILL (2017)

FIRST KILL
(US/UK - 2017)

Directed by Steven C. Miller. Written by Nick Gordon. Cast: Hayden Christensen, Bruce Willis, Gethin Anthony, Megan Leonard, Tyler Jon Olson, Shea Buckner, Ty Shelton, Will Demeo, Deb Girdley, Magi Avila, Christine Dye. (R, 101 mins)

The latest installment in Lionsgate/Grindstone's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series offers a bit of a stretch for Bruno. He's out and about in this one, sitting in a police cruiser, strolling through town while some extras gawk at him, and walking through the woods, but on several occasions, the former actor demonstrates his seething contempt for both his craft and his colleagues, going full Seagal by being clumsily doubled for shots in which he simply couldn't be bothered to stick around. For instance, in a scene where he's seated in a diner and he's joined by someone, it's Willis in the close-ups, but when there's a cut to an over-the-shoulder shot of the actor who's in the booth across from him, Willis is doubled from the back by a bald stand-in with a narrower head and ears that stick out, almost as if director Steven C. Miller (who previously tolerated Willis' lack of commitment to EXTRACTION and MARAUDERS) is passive-aggressively calling out the star's laziness. It gets even worse later on, when Willis is holding a gun on someone, threatening to shoot them, and in close-up, moves to point the gun down and to his left. Cut to the person he's about to shoot, and Willis' Fake Shemp is pointing the gun at the person from behind and to the right, his face obscured by a tree trunk. Is Miller even trying to match these shots after Willis leaves? There's even a few shots of the back of the double's head with dialogue and it's not even Willis' voice. There's no way Willis spends more than a day or two on these VOD trifles, but they can't even Facetime him or get him on speaker and have him say a couple of rewritten lines after he's gone?

It probably took me longer to write the above paragraph than it did for Willis to shoot his scenes for FIRST KILL. As far as forgettable VOD thrillers go, it's hardly the worst of its kind, but that's far from an endorsement. Miller seemed to be heading in the right direction with the surprisingly OK MARAUDERS, which was good despite the presence of Coast Hard. MARAUDERS had an inspired performance by Christopher Meloni to help it rise above the norm for these things, but all FIRST KILL has is Hayden Christensen, whose bland, blank persona has worked in his favor in SHATTERED GLASS and nothing else. Christensen is Will Beeman, a Wall Street broker who decides to get away for some bonding time with wife Laura (Megan Leonard) and bullied 11-year-old son Danny (Ty Shelton). Heading back to his rural hometown of Granville, OH (where this was shot, about 30 miles outside of Columbus) to stay with his Aunt Dottie (Deb Girdler), Will thinks teaching Danny how to use a rifle and taking him on a deer hunt will toughen him up. All's going well until they witness an argument between two men about the location of a bag of money that ends up with one being shot. The other sees Danny and starts shooting, prompting Will to kill him in self defense. The first man is still breathing, so Will takes him back to the cabin where nurse (conveniently enough) Laura removes the bullet and stitches him up. The injured man--wanted bank robber Levi Barrett (Gethin Anthony, best known as Renly Baratheon on GAME OF THRONES and as Charles Manson on AQUARIUS)--is so grateful that he takes Danny hostage, instigating a chain of events that finds Will playing along and helping Levi recover the money if it means keeping Danny safe, all under the watchful eye of Granville police chief Howell (Willis), who, per the script and presumably Willis' contract, exists on the periphery of the story most of the way, appearing periodically to remind the viewer of two things: 1) that Howell has a personal stake in recovering the money that goes beyond the duties of his job, and 2) that Bruce Willis is still in the movie.

FIRST KILL owes a bit to Bruce Beresford's THE CONTRACT, a 2007 Bulgaria-shot DTV thriller where John Cusack and his son are camping and end up tangling with a government-contracted killer played by a slumming Morgan Freeman. But its primary influence seems to be Clint Eastwood's 1993 drama A PERFECT WORLD, where Clint played a sheriff pursuing fugitive Kevin Costner, who bonds with a little boy he's taken hostage. Much effort is made to show that Levi is not a bad guy--after all, he's using the money to pay for medical care for his girlfriend's terminally ill mother. He also lets Danny play violent video games that his parents won't allow, and the shy, introverted child feels more at ease around Levi than he does living up to the expectations of his well-meaning but hard-driving dad. Christensen doesn't exactly sell it well when he's shown as the top power player at a bustling Wall Street office where he's barking orders at underlings and asking "Was the meeting with the Saudis today?" FIRST KILL doesn't offer any surprises as far as plot developments go--it's shown too early that Willis' Howell is up to something when he quietly tells his deputy "We may have a problem," though that's hard to tell if it's related to the script or if Miller caught Willis telling an actor whose name he likely never bothered to learn that he's upset about still being on the set. FIRST KILL is never dull and it isn't awful, but it's dumb (nice convenient placement of the four-wheelers for the chase scene) and the very definition of perfunctory, and it's brought down a notch by Willis' utter disinterest. You've crossed the line into Seagal territory when your double is laughably obvious. The only time that's acceptable is if an actor died during production and it's out of tragic necessity to complete the movie and pay respect to the late actor. Here, it's just done to keep Willis from being inconvenienced. The climax involves an emboldened Danny pointing a gun at Howell. It's tough to stage a face-off when one of the actors isn't even there, but I guess young Ty Shelton learned something about dealing with the demands of spoiled actors on his first movie. Hey kid, maybe someday you'll actually meet Bruce Willis and you can remind him you were in a movie together.

In Theaters/On VOD: ARSENAL (2017)

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.

In Theaters/On VOD: MARAUDERS (2016)

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.