Mark Reviews Movies: OUT OF DEATH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 15, 2021

For whatever reason or reasons, Out of Death gives the definitive sense of a movie that was cobbled together from available footage. Its two stars, Bruce Willis and Jaime King, disappear for long stretches of time. From all of the shots below the neck, we can tell that a good number of scenes featuring Willis' character were achieved using a double, and that doesn't even take into account the amount of the actor's performance that is literally phoned-in here.

It doesn't help that Willis look and/or sounds alternately bored and annoyed throughout this movie (There's one line delivery that almost sounds as if it was recorded outside of the actor's trailer, as a poor assistant has to call him for the day's shoot). Look, there's little avoiding or denying that the actor has more or less given up in recent years. A performance such as this one might finally alert even the most tempted of filmmakers, hoping to attach a known name to their low-budget action schlock, that hiring Willis isn't worth it anymore.

There isn't much, admittedly, to Bill Lawrence's screenplay, which features a plot revolving around a protracted chase through a swamp in Georgia and nothing else of any significance. With the amount of cutting around Willis that director Mike Burns has to do here, the end result barely feels like coherent story.

It's left to the rest of the cast, who—for better and mostly for worse—at least try in their performances, to carry what's an already thin story, clearly thinned even more by the obvious absence of at least one of its central characters. One ends up feeling pretty bad for everyone involved.

The story has King's Shannon, a grieving daughter who wants to spread her father's remains at the top of a hill (The dad told her she could never finish the hike, and defining the full extent of her character, she wants to prove him wrong), accidentally stumbling upon and photographing a murder. The killer is a crooked cop named Billie (Lala Kent), a local Sheriff's deputy who shoots a cocaine dealer because, well, there wouldn't be a story if she and her fellow cops weren't villains and if Shannon didn't happen to be wherever she is to document the murder. The actual staging of that scene just makes us wonder where Shannon actually is in relation to the killing and, if she's clearly as close as she would have to be to get that particular angle, how Billie doesn't spot her immediately.

Meanwhile, Willis' Jack is a grieving widower, deciding to spend some time away from the city at the home of his niece (played by Kelly Greyson). He's a cop, too, and speaking of awkward staging, that information is revealed by Jack (either Willis or his double, for all we know) laying his badge and pistol on a table, as if the guy, currently and after a lengthy drive on vacation, waited to leave behind those character-defining objects just at the time we'd be able to take note of them.

Obviously, Jack stumbles upon Shannon, as she's about to be executed by Billie and fellow deputy Tom (Tyler Jon Olson), who come across as if they're waiting for someone to stumble upon the scene of their attempted murder. Jack and Shannon escape the corrupt cops, so Hank (Michael Sirow), the Sheriff and Tom's brother, decides to join the hunt.

That's basically it, although the strange thing is how much time we end up spending with the crooked cops, as they blunder and bumble their way through the woods, get irritated with each other, or look for prey that is as elusive as the stars' actual presence in this movie. None of these three actors is capable of carrying this particular story, but to put it in a more charitable context, it's also obvious that none of them were supposed to be put in such a position in the first place. King does what she can with a character who primarily exists to be scared, although the character's tendency to run right in front of her pursuers betrays that characteristic.

After a lot of running and yelling and sneaking, there's an inevitable final confrontation, involving a plan that's both unnecessary and extremely dumb (Jack decides to use an innocent stranger as bait, apparently, although the stranger ultimately doesn't actually matter to the scheme working in the end). Willis' MIA status here is a most noticeable issue, but it's definitely not the most significant problem with the fundamentally faulty Out of Death.

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