Mark Reviews Movies: BULLET PROOF

Bullet Proof, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 18, 2022

In Bullet Proof, a generic anti-hero is pursued by a generic villain, along with his generic goons, through a series of generic chase and action sequences. Cooper Bibaud and Danny Mac's screenplay doesn't have an original idea in its head.

In a way, this movie doesn't have to possess anything unique about it. After all, the chase and the attitude the movie projects while going through the motions of that simple plot amount to the whole point. Apart from a couple performances, though, even that attitude is lacking here.

The plot revolves around an unnamed thief, played by director James C. Clayton with the same level of general disinterest that he brings to the filmmaking. The thief is in the process of stealing a bag of cash from a junkyard that's a base of operations for Temple (Vinnie Jones), a ruthless crime boss, when he's spotted by the gangster's henchmen. This isn't the last scene to take place in a junkyard, by the way, so there's at least some consistency in how the movie embraces the cheapness of its production and storytelling.

After some shooting and fast driving through the yard, the thief believes he's free and clear, but along the highway, he hears something in the trunk of the henchman's car he has commandeered. Upon popping the trunk, the thief discovers Mia (Lina Lecompte), Temple's pregnant wife, who is trying to run away from her husband. Despite his plans to catch a flight out of the country with his stolen retirement fun, our protagonist decides to help Mia in her escape efforts.

That's the full extent of the plot, which occasionally stops for the runaways to bicker and briefly bond, for Temple and his henchmen—mainly the sociopathic Skinny (played by screenwriter Mac), who has a thing for torture, and the slightly less psychotic the Frenchman (Janvier Katabarwa), who just murders his targets—to show off how villainous they are, and for those action sequences, which become predictable and repetitive quite quickly. There's little inspiration to the staging or editing of those scenes, apart from a couple of throwaway gags related timing (The thief, for example, adjusts a rear-view mirror just before a goon takes a shot at him).

For a couple quick positives, Lecompte has some pluck that makes her character a bit more than a distressed damsel (although it's a bit off-putting how often Mia lets our sort-of hero use her as a human shield). Meanwhile, Jones—who receives top billing, despite having about as much screen time as Temple's various hoodlums—is effectively imposing as the seemingly unstoppable threat.

The plot of Bullet Proof moves at a clip for the most part, which is more a benefit for us than it is a virtue of Clayton's filmmaking. When a story is as thin as it is here, brevity just comes with the territory, after all.

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