On Blu-ray/DVD/VOD: HARD KILL (2020) and THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY (2020)

HARD KILL
(US - 2020)

It would appear that Lionsgate/Grindstone's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series has come to an end, as what would logically be the latest installment is instead being distributed by the lowly Vertical Entertainment. Sure, maybe Emmett/Furla Films' distribution deal was up, but I'm willing to bet that Lionsgate watched HARD KILL and decided that even with COVID-19 production shutdowns, they weren't this desperate for product. It's hard to believe Willis has been doing these VOD/DTV walk-throughs for a decade now (there's almost 20 of them so far, with more on the way), and the bottom-scraping HARD KILL is by far the worst of the bunch. Teaming for a third consecutive time with regressing director Matt Eskandari after TRAUMA CENTER and SURVIVE THE NIGHT, Willis once again does the bare minimum in HARD KILL, spending most of his screen time alone in a safe room, until his ubiquitous double sneaks out, gets caught, then Willis spends the rest of the film zip-tied to a chair, grimacing at either the sounds of a shootout or wondering exactly how he--Willis, not the character--ended up here. To call the plot threadbare would be overselling it, but Willis is Dayton Chalmers, the CEO of the tech behemoth Chapterhouse. His daughter Dr. Ava Chalmers (Lala Kent) has created a potentially dangerous AI program known as "Project 725," which has vaguely-defined destructive powers if it ends up in the wrong hands. That's exactly what happens when the easily-manipulated Ava falls in with "The Pardoner" (Sergio Rizzuto), an international terrorist who wants to use Project 725 to burn down the global economy. Enter PTSD-stricken Black Ops military contractor Miller (Jesse Metcalfe), who brings along his crew--Dash (Swen Temmel), Sasha (WWE star Natalie Eva Marie), and her brother Harrison (Jon Galanis)--at the suggestion of Chalmer's security chief Fox (Texas Battle), and sets up shop in an abandoned warehouse where The Pardoner is supposed to bring the kidnapped Ava in exchange for Project 725's fail-safe access code. Naturally, it's personal for Miller, who was nearly killed during a past encounter with The Pardoner, exposition conveyed in the most leaden way possible ("He put a bullet in my back...and I still have the scars to prove it").

Even the most generic action movies usually have to work their way up to the climactic showdown at the abandoned warehouse, but HARD KILL--on Blu-ray and DVD four days after bowing at a handful of drive-ins and theaters--spends about 95% of its duration there. That leaves everyone little to do but walk around and yell in between periodic shootouts where The Pardoner's seemingly unlimited supply of faceless, black-helmeted goons run in only to be immediately killed by Miller and his team. HARD KILL is so uninspired that it's the second one of these VOD-era Willis titles--after 2015's EXTRACTION--where he spends most of the movie tied to a chair. And EXTRACTION almost looks like DIE HARD compared to HARD KILL, which is positively Albert Pyun-esque with the way everyone just wanders around the abandoned warehouse to pad the running time, with Eskandari not even remotely interested in conveying the layout or where anyone or anything is in relation to anything else. Willis is visibly bored beyond belief, and he's almost got some competition in the coasting department from Battle, whose character gets shot early and spends the rest of the movie sitting on a table. Kent, Temmel, and Rizzuto appear to be trying to one-up each other to see who can give the worst performance, but I'm calling it for Rizzuto, who gets one of those long bad guy speeches that starts with "You know why they call me 'The Pardoner?'" and proceeds to invoke "The Pardoner's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. Shot in the Cincinnati area and boasting a ludicrous 31 credited producers, HARD KILL is depressingly bad. It's Seagal bad. There is absolutely nothing here. And worst of all, it's insanely boring, lethargically-paced with no sense of urgency to the proceedings, no suspense given the high stakes, and no effort on the part of the cast to convincingly sell any of it, with Rizzuto about as plausible a feared international terrorist as VANDERPUMP RULES' Kent is as a scientific genius who invents a game-changing AI program. Willis' mumbling sleepwalk of a performance is the least of HARD KILL's problems, and in all seriousness, is he OK? Willis has never been particularly good at hiding his disinterest in a project, but in these last few VOD outings, he's talking slower, he moves gingerly--something seems off in a 1945-1946 Curly Howard way and it's getting noticeable to the point where roasting him really doesn't feel right. (R, 98 mins)




THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY
(UK/US/Italy/Canada - 2020)

A low-key thriller set in the art world that manages to keep your interest while not quite working to its full potential, THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY is based on a 1971 novel by Charles Willeford, best known for his series of Hoke Moseley detective thrillers that inspired the 1990 cult classic MIAMI BLUES. The script is written by Scott B. Smith, who earned an Oscar nomination for adapting his own novel A Simple Plan into a film for Sam Raimi back in 1998, and to that end, THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY is in that same wheelhouse with a seemingly easy, simple act that snowballs into something out of control, but the stakes never quite resonate and the forward momentum is lacking, even when things really start to go south. Some of that might be due to the Merchant-Ivory pacing, some of it to Scott and THE DOUBLE HOUR director Giuseppe Capotondo's many deviations from the novel, which was set in the noir hotbed of Florida, while the more TALENTED MR. RIPLEY-esque film moves to lush areas of Italy. But much of the sense of inertia that permeates the proceedings can be laid on the shoulders of the bland Claes Bang, the Danish star of Ruben Ostlund's wildly overrated THE SQUARE and the extremely divisive Netflix miniseries DRACULA. Purveyors of international art cinema keeps trying to make Bang happen, but beyond his awesome name, there's just not much movie star charisma or screen presence there.

Bang is James Figueras, a pill-popping Milan-based art critic and arrogant bullshit artist who hooks up with American Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki) after one of his museum lectures. She accompanies him to an already-planned weekend visit to the Lake Como summer estate of obscenely wealthy art collector Joseph Cassidy (a grinning, reptilian Mick Jagger, in his first acting role since 2002's THE MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS). Cassidy offers Figueras an exclusive once thought unimaginable: an interview with reclusive artist Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), who's been off the grid for the last 50 years, after all of his work was destroyed in a fire. Debney is living in a cottage on the Cassidy estate, but won't sell or allow anyone to even see his paintings, not even Cassidy, whose offer to Figueras is two-fold: he also wants a Debney for his collection and more or less encourages Figueras to do whatever is necessary to procure it. Smith and Capotondi indulge in some caustic commentary on the general idea of critics as being pompously full of shit at best and utterly immoral at worst, which gives you an idea of the places a corrupt bastard like Figueras is willing to go, especially being prodded by an almost Mephistophelian Cassidy. Jagger is well-cast, while Sutherland (also in Giuseppe Tornatore's somewhat similar Italy-set art forgery drama THE BEST OFFER back in 2014) deploys some inconsistent Southern drawl that's just distracting, and Debicki creates an interesting character that the film doesn't always successfully utilize. All these shortcomings manage to dissipate in a terrific finale that's almost enough to trick you into thinking the rest of the movie was just as good. Even with the void at the center that is Claes Bang, there's still enough to appreciate that it warrants a look, especially for Jagger completists and fans of the promising Debicki (WIDOWS and Christopher Nolan's COVID-19-delayed TENET). Speaking of the pandemic, THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY was yet another coronavirus casualty, its limited release stalled after its second week in March and its April expansion nixed when US theaters were closed. Sony Pictures Classics very quietly relaunched it in early August just a couple of weeks before its Blu-ray/DVD street date. (R, 98 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: TRAUMA CENTER (2019)

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. 

In Theaters/On VOD: 10 MINUTES GONE (2019)

10 MINUTES GONE
(US - 2019)

Directed by Brian A. Miller. Written by Kelvin Mao and Jeff Jingle. Cast: Michael Chiklis, Bruce Willis, Meadow Williams, Kyle Schmid, Lydia Hull, Lala Kent, Texas Battle, Swen Temmel, John Hickman, Sergio Rizzuto, Tyler Jon Olson, Geoff Reeves, Tanya Mityushima, Megan Neuringer. (R, 88 mins)

The latest installment in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, 10 MINUTES GONE also marks his fourth collaboration--more like chance encounters--with director Brian A. Miller, following the triumphant trio of THE PRINCE, VICE, and REPRISAL (it's OK if you don't remember those, because Willis doesn't either). An accurate description of the amount of time Bruno probably spent on set, 10 MINUTES GONE is a day trip to Cincinnati, OH for the former actor, who appears sporadically as Rex, a go-between who organizes heist crews for wealthy benefactors requiring distance. He has his usual crew but brings in a couple of outsiders for this latest job--veteran safecracker Frank (Michael Chiklis)--"the best lock man outside of New York," according to Rex--and Frank's younger brother Joe (Tyler Jon Olson), who worked on a Rex job once before but got pinched. Joe's got a bad rep as a result ("Even when he worked all the angles, the chips never fell his way," someone says about him) and the more reliable Frank tags along to vouch for him. Of course, the job--a bank robbery where Frank has to get into the vault to retrieve a mysterious case--goes south when Rex's crew--Griffin (Kyle Schmid), Baxter (Swen Temmel, also one of 25 credited producers), and Marshall (Sergio Rizzuto, also one of 25 credited producers)--are nowhere to be found after an alarm gets pulled. Frank and Joe use a secondary exit only to have Frank get bonked on the head in an alley during their getaway. He comes to ten minutes later to find Joe dead, the case missing, and no clue what went down in the time he was out cold. Convinced he's been set up, Frank teams with Joe's bartender girlfriend Claire (Meadow Williams, also one of 25 credited producers) and hunts down the other three members of Rex's crew of Reservoir Assclowns. Meanwhile, an irate Rex--from the confines of a nearly empty office on the top floor of a high rise overlooking downtown Cincy--sends his ruthless "fixer" Ivory (Lydia Hull, also one of 25 credited producers) to track down Frank when she isn't putting on shades and walking away from explosions as slowly as possible.

The idea of that blank ten minutes has a little in common with Miller's most recent film, the straight-to-VOD BACKTRACE, a film that inexplicably had Sylvester Stallone second-billed to Ryan "Who?" Guzman. But aside from that, 10 MINUTES GONE is so shameless in its groveling, slobbering HEAT worship that even DEN OF THIEVES is looking away in embarrassment. The clumsily-edited shootouts only succeed in making this look like the cheap, Redbox-ready ripoff that it is, but what makes 10 MINUTES GONE worse than usual for its ilk is the laughable script by first-timers Kelvin Mao and Jeff Jingle, a pair of writers who never encountered a cliche they couldn't utilize, starting with some opening narration from Chiklis explaining the rules of Three-Card Monte ("the shills conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer, when in fact, they're simply conspiring with the dealer to cheat the mark"), which still doesn't make the events that transpire any more coherent. Almost every line sounds like something David Caruso would've deemed too cheesy to utter on CSI: MIAMI. Just a random sampling:

• Rex: "None of us would be here if we didn't believe in honor among thieves."
• Frank: "We got a rat in the crew!" 
• Rex: "Who else is after this thing?" 
• Frank: "The heat's comin' down!" 
• Mysterious European benefactor: "Ze clock is ticking."
• Frank, before shooting Baxter in the ankle: "Hey Baxter, ya like dancin'?"
• Doctor who stitched up Griffin, who's vanished from a safe house: "Gone with the wind..."
• Rex, glaring at diagrams on a clear dry-erase board: "This was planned to perfection! What happened?"
• Rex, answering phone: "Talk to me!"
• Rex: "Check his burner!"
• Rex: "Let's load 'em up!"
• Rex: "Time to clear the board! Liquidate everyone!" 

But no one in 10 MINUTES GONE needs Cliche-to-English subtitles like Temmel's Baxter who, in the span of about 30 seconds, drops these turds in rapid-fire succession:

• "How do I know you weren't gonna bring the Five-0?"
• "We in some gnarly shit, Hoss!"
• "I covered my post!"
• "It was clear till things went postal!"
• "We were sittin' on the guards when the fireworks started!"
• "You know how he rolls! Charlie Bronson had to check it out!"
• "I got the hell outta Dodge when the alarms chimed!"

Chiklis is a fine actor and obviously smart enough to know a piece of shit when he's in one, but he soldiers through like a pro because a lead role is a lead role--even if he has to carry Williams, who's a terrible actress--especially when it allows him to indulge in some ass-kicking like a beefy Jason Statham, which maybe reminded him of some glory days on THE SHIELD. As for Willis, it is what it is: another one-day gig in Cincinnati where 95% of his minimal screen time takes place in one room and you can't tell if his later annoyance is him in character over the plot developments or if it's because Willis himself has to be inconvenienced by moving to a different set for the obligatory showdown. In this case, it's a new wing of a train station that's under construction, probably the closest thing they could find to an abandoned warehouse before they ran out of time and Willis' double would have to be pressed into service. The climactic twist is about as predictable and ho-hum as it gets, so much so that it requires the surprise villain to offer this startling auto-critique of the film in progress: "Never walk into a place you don't know how to get out of. Sound familiar?" Yeah, because we've all seen HEAT.