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Vanquish
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| Year: |
2021
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Director: |
George Gallo
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| Stars: |
Morgan Freeman, Ruby Rose, Patrick Muldoon, Nick Vallelonga, Julie Lott, Hannah Stocking, Joel Michaely, Miles Doleac, Paul Sampson, Richard Salvatore, Ele Bardha, Bill Luckett, Chris Mullinax, Nate Adams, Reg Rob
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| Genre: |
Drama, Action, Thriller |
| Rating: |
  3 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Damon (Morgan Freeman) used to be the greatest cop in the United States, that is until he was shot in an assassination attempt that he survived, but was paralysed by, leaving him in a wheelchair. He is fortunate in that he has plenty of money, and lives in a huge house by the coast where he is looked after by housekeeper and bodyguard Victoria (Ruby Rose) who brings her young daughter with her when working. But there is bad news: the girl is very ill and needs treatment her mother cannot afford, so when he finds out about her plight, Damon takes the only course of action available to him. He kidnaps the moppet and forces Victoria to pick up millions of dollars from five gangsters.
Wait, what? Logic not so much flew out of the window as was never in the room in the first place in a film from the writer of Midnight Run and Bad Boys, George Gallo, here helming his own projects and suggesting he had had precisely two good ideas in his career, and this film contained neither of them. You knew you were in trouble when the company logos and opening credits took up nearly seven minutes of your precious time, followed by a sequence where a gang of crooked cops appeared to include an actual rat which they converse with about what to do with an unconscious member of their profession. If the rat had stuck around, we might have been in for something more diverting, but alas he is a one-scene wonder.
Anyway, given the only people in Damon's house when he kidnaps the child are himself, Victoria and said child, you would have thought it would have been easy enough to overpower an elderly man in a wheelchair and call out to the daughter to track her down, but then we would have no story. You might argue we had no story whatever this played out as, but before you know it, our wavering-accented heroine was motoring around anonymous city streets on a motorbike, in constant radio contact with the dastardly (but maybe not really) Damon, because we know how easy it is to chat while on a motorbike, what with them being practically silent and all. These gangster encounters unfold more or less without variation, leaving the bad guys dead from bullet wounds and Vicki with a big bag of money to take back to Damon.
Now, some may be wondering "Ruby left Batwoman for this?!" but she had form in choosing low budget actioners willing to offer her the starring role. Freeman was more of a mystery, sure, he had suffered some bad press in the time leading up to this, but he wasn't Kevin Spacey, and you would have thought he was still enough of a name to be offered something more prestigious than spending an entire movie sitting about watching CCTV and delivering state the bleeding obvious dialogue. Maybe he wanted an easy (and sedentary) paycheque - this looks as if his scenes were shot over the course of a single day. Suffice to say, this was nobody's finest hour and a half, though if you wanted an extensive rundown of the most widely used, spoken cliches in action flicks then you had come to the right place. Otherwise, it was edited to get the most footage out of the least amount of effort, came across as if nobody involved gave a shit about entertainment, and was purely made because supermarket DVD shelves won't fill themselves. Music by Aldo Shllaku.
[Signature Entertainment presents Vanquish on Premium Digital Platforms 28th May 2021.]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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