Mark Reviews Movies: FINAL SCORE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 13, 2018

The story isn't new: One man must thwart the plans of a group of terrorists who have taken over a place. The place in Final Score is London Stadium in the middle of a soccer game. The terrorists are the remnants of a separatist group from a Russian state, who had brought their homeland to civil war about 20 years before the start of the story. The protagonist is a retired officer from the American Army, who made a bad call that resulted in the deaths of his entire squad, including the man whom he considered to be like a brother.

None of this is especially important, except, perhaps, the location, which serves as one of the major stars of the movie. With its crammed bleachers and its lengthy walkways and its many rooms, the stadium provides the movie's screenwriters (Jonathan Frank, David T. Lynch, and Keith Lynch—the last two credited as "the brothers Lynch") and director Scott Mann with a variety of spaces in which to orchestrate a series of action sequences. The trick to such a movie is that we have to believe what happens, even if it starts to become a bit ridiculous.

This one becomes pretty ridiculous, but even so, the hero and the villains seem to know what they're doing. We don't expect genius levels of intelligence from the characters in a movie such as this one, but we do hope that we won't spend the entirety of the movie in disbelief over how incredibly dumb they are.

It's all about internal logic, and this film more or less passes the test on that matter. We get a sense that the protagonist and his opponents, who have threatened to detonate a section of the stadium if they don't get what they want, are capable of being one step ahead of each other. They're smart enough, even as the situations in which they find themselves become increasingly ludicrous.

I'm not sure if that makes the film self-aware or even clever, but it certainly means it's never dull. There is some logic here, as silly as it occasionally may be. Take a late chase sequence, in which Michael (Dave Bautista), the veteran who has to become a one-man army, rides a motorcycle through a concourse of the stadium.

This might sound silly, and indeed, the moment that we first our hero on a motorcycle, speeding down the long walkway and dodging a few soccer fans, is worth a hearty guffaw. There's a reason he's on a motorcycle, though. He has to get from one corner of the stadium to another, with a stop along the way, in a certain amount of time. A couple of the baddies decide to chase him, so they get their own motorcycles. This also makes enough sense. If we're on board this far into the sequence, then it's just a tiny hop of faith to understand how, after taking a wrong turn, Michael and a villain end up continuing their chase on the roof of the stadium. Like I said, it's silly, but it definitely isn't dull.

Michael is at the stadium with Danni (Lara Peake), the daughter of the dead man who was like a brother to him, as part of his continual attempts to atone for the death of the teenage girl's father. The villain is Arkady (Ray Stevenson), half of the fraternal duo who led a failed revolution within Russia, who is looking for his believed-to-be dead brother Dimitri (Pierce Brosnan) in the stands. With his goons, Arkady takes over the security room of the stadium and plants a lot of explosives underneath a section of the stands.

Michael accidentally finds out about the terrorist takeover, of course, and naturally, he and Danni are separated early on, meaning that he has to stop the terrorists' plan while searching for the girl he calls his niece. Obviously, the terrorists take Michael's interference personally, and does it need to be said that they start looking for Danni as a way of stopping the man?

We can predict the basics of this plot and its assorted details, but that's beside the point. What matters, really, is the game of cat-and-mouse. Michael knows what he's doing, using a radio to call in the cops (who don't believe him at first, of course) and to evade the terrorists as well as he can (He has some help from a hesitant security guard, played by Amit Shah, who's decent comic relief). The villains know what they're doing, too, keeping an eye on Michael's movements using the security cameras in the stadium and keeping the cops at bay with the coerced aid of the head of the stadium's security.

The action escalates, too. It goes from a brutal close-quarters fight in a cramped elevator, to an even more brutal shootout/fistfight in a kitchen (where we see that Michael may be unstoppable but isn't invulnerable), and to a lot of things happening on the roof—from Michael dodging bullets, to riding that motorcycle, and to a climactic hostage exchange. That last part is only the start of the film's actual climax, which has at least three major sequences within it.

Then there's Bautista, who makes for a solid hero of a relatively ordinary vein—part determined, part exasperated, part uncertain, and fully deadpan in his delivery. It's the right performance for Final Score, sincere enough that we buy the character's actions and tongue-in-cheek enough that we might start thinking the film is aware of its absurdities. Whether or not it is, it's still entertaining.

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