Lionsgate / Maple Pictures

No, this isn’t a remake of the 1994 Ice-T Surviving the Game. Unfortunately, this is yet another low-budget action film starring Bruce Willis that has this reviewer wondering if we’ll ever get a great film out of Willis ever again. For the past few years it seems Bruce Willis has given up doing A-list films and has instead gone the route of straight-to-disc releases, and the films have ranged from tolerable to garbage. This is frustrating, because I think we can all agree he’s better than this, but he seems to be fine cashing the paychecks and going onto set and looking miserable from one scene to the next. I miss seeing Bruce Willis being the average-Joe badass. The Last Boy Scout? Heck, at this point I’d rather see him in a Hudson Hawk revival, but alas, this seems to be what we’re stuck with.
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I’ve gotten used to the cinematic disasters Bruce Willis has attached himself to over the past few years.  I’ll admit, I was surprised to see him in Motherless Brooklyn, and after his impressive performance in Glass, I had hoped he was going to attempt to get himself in to some higher caliber films.  Willis has stayed in shape, especially for an action icon who is getting up there in his years, and he still manages to have a presence when he appears on screen.  Sure, I get that we can’t expect him to keep throwing himself out of exploding buildings and having elaborate fight scenes. In a perfect world, I’d love to see him be able to revisit the role of Joe Hallenbeck in a The Last Boy Scout sequel. Heck, while staying on the nostalgia train, I’d be on board with a Hudson Hawk sequel over some of these direct-to-video films he’s been doing.  Getting back to Trauma Center, we have a new direct-to-video action film that features Willis attempting to save a young girl’s life who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Is the film worth checking out, or is it one you should simply pull the plug on and avoid?
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Back in the 80’s and 90’s it was a glorious time for crazy, over-the-top action films. The names that most notably come to mind when I think of this time in action cinema are Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.  They were the guys who knew how to make a popcorn action film: Beverly Hills Cop, Days of Thunder, Bad Boys, and many more. While Line of Duty isn’t quite in the same league of these films, it definitely has its roots in these films, and for a VOD action film, well, this film is all kinds of absurd fun.   Director Steven C. Miller has had some duds over the span of his career, though I did enjoy his take on Silent Night, but Line of Duty shows that the man is capable of helming a white-knuckle action film if given a proper budget and script to work with. When it comes to Aaron Eckhart, I’m kind of surprised we don’t see him as the lead in more tent pole action films.  Sure, many of us know him for his turn as Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, but he’s a guy with so much untapped talent. It was nice to see it on display in this film. Frank Penny (Eckhart) is a disgraced cop who is responsible for getting a kid killed and is now stuck working as a beat cop.  It doesn’t take long for the film to ramp up as Frank is caught up in a foot chase with a suspect involved with the kidnapping of the chief of police’s daughter.  There is a lot of running in this opening act, and things go bad to worse for Penny when he’s put in a situation where he kills the only lead to finding the kidnapped daughter.
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I have to be honest; when I got this title and saw that Jim Gaffigan was starring, I didn’t know what to expect, but I went into this film with some low expectations.  I’m a fan of Gaffigan, and I own a few of his stand-up albums, but seeing him headlining a thriller, well, it was a tough leap for me.  Now that I’ve seen the film, I got to say I’m impressed by what he pulled off with this film.  That being said, as I was watching this film, I couldn’t help but see a similarity between Gaffigan and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.  I doubt this was intentional, and perhaps it’s just my subconscious attempting to make these connections, but Gaffigan’s performance in this film  is on par with many of the performances we saw from Hoffman in his later years. As for the film, American Dreamer follows Cam (Gaffigan), a down-on-his-luck schlub who at one point was living the American dream: a good job, a nice home, and a wife and child.  Then he lost his job, and everything else seemed to disappear around him. Now he’s a driver for a ride share company, where he struggles with paying child support and has had a bit of a mental breakdown.
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It’s frustrating seeing a film starring Michael Chiklis and Bruce Willis and knowing before you’ve even watched five minutes of the film that it’s not going to be good.  I mean, come on; you have the star of The Shield and then an action movie icon, but neither can save this film.  10 Minutes Gone is one of those films where on paper it seems like a surefire hit, but somehow instead of a white-knuckle action thriller, the result is a snooze-fest that will keep you guessing as to why these actors signed on for this film. Frank (Chiklis) has been hired by Rex (Willis) to pull off what seems to be an easy heist.  Frank and his team seemed to have thought of everything and have even put together some backup plans, but as expected, the heist ends up going bad, and in the process Frank is knocked out cold and loses 10 minutes. In this time he’s lost possession of the jewels, and he needs to figure out what happened to them before Rex has him killed.  It’s not a bad idea for a movie, but it’s the execution of this film that is a mess.  Willis and Chiklis do their best to make the dialog work, and at times the can make the scenes flow, but once the film shifts to any other character you start to wonder if this film was written by a 12-yea- old boy who just binged a bunch of older action/ detective films while chugging Red Bull and snorting lines of sugar.
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When you have a movie that features Gary Oldman, you’d expect it to be pretty good.  I feel Gary Oldman is one of the best actors who is working in the business, and I’ve been a fan since the Romeo is Bleeding and Leon days.  So when a movie comes along about killers and government assassins and Oldman is playing a character in the middle of all the drama, you’d think this is going to be something great. After all, the man finally got an Academy Award, which was long overdue.  The best way I can describe my experience with this is film is to imagine you’re going to a restaurant, one that is a two star rating in the Michelin Guide. While it may not be the best, it should still be good; yet when you get there, rather than getting a great meal you instead are given a plate of lukewarm Spaghetti-O’s fresh out of the can.  From poorly framed shots to insipid plot twists, I can’t help but wonder, what did Gary Oldman do so wrong to be stuck in this film?
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John Travolta is one of those guys I like, but it seems like it has been ages since he’s done a great film.  Sure, he was great in The People vs. OJ Simpson where he played attorney Robert Shapiro, but apart from that role, it’s been a while since we’ve seen Travolta really make a splash at the box office. Personally I love seeing the guy on screen. Blow Out, Get Shorty and Pulp Fiction are just a few of my favorite films that he has been in, and I keep hoping his career will bounce back, but unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’ll be happening any time soon. Speed Kills is a film that has a story that is oozing with so much potential that if it were put in the hands of Brian De Palma or Michael Mann you could almost guarantee this film would be destined for greatness.  Unfortunately the result is a frustrating mess that manages to make boat racing and drug smuggling in the age of the “cocaine cowboys” seem boring.
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It seems there isn’t an action film Bruce Willis can say no to.  It feels as though every couple of months there is an action film that has an appearance from Willis, and frankly it’s a little disappointing.  He’s a guy who can bring in the major box office dollars, but it seems more and more of the action stars are settling for the direct-to-video route for the simple paycheck and moving on to the next.  With the number of films being churned out for the cinemas, DVD and Blu-ray, and the streaming services, it seems the film industry is simply becoming a business of quantity rather than quality due to the amount of demand needed.  Reprisal is the latest example of this demand for quantity rather than quality as we get a pedestrian action film that plays by the numbers and will be forgotten by the year’s end, and that’s a shame considering its two leads.
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