Mark Reviews Movies: PURSUIT (2022)

Pursuit, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 17, 2022

One wonders if Pursuit was made on some kind of dare. So much of this rambling, low-budget actioner is so incompetent that the absence of competence almost starts to look like a deliberate choice.

There are too many fascinatingly strange decisions made here to form a full list of them with any kind of confidence. Co-writer/director Brian Skiba almost deserves some credit for having the guts to believe any of them might work.

Here, the story revolves around Rick Calloway (Emile Hirsch), a master hacker whose wife went missing two weeks prior, and Mike Breslin (Jake Manley), a New York City police detective whose own wife was murdered fairly recently. There's no connection to the killings, in theory, or to the characters, except that the hacker's search for his wife just happens to coincide with an undercover drug bust at a motel being run by the detective.

Before all of that nonsense, which includes a lot of pointless slow-motion shooting and a pile of money spontaneously flying into the air for no physical reason, we come to learn of Rick's misfortune. He stares and broadly reacts to a series of text boxes and images on his computer, which looks decidedly like how unaware filmmakers in the mid-1990s believed the internet appeared.

Hirsch, who's generally a reliable and thoughtful actor, isn't just doing a caricature of a generic hacker here, with his many temporary tattoos (Some of them look a bit smudgy during a later sequence when the character is in distress). His performance is so unaligned with anything recognizable—the voice, the intonation of his admittedly hacky dialogue, the maliciously maniacal and comfortably laidback attitude—that it feels more like a caricature of human behavior from an alien entity only knows of such matters from over-the-top villains in terrible action movies. Compared to some of the lazy or disinterested performances around Hirsch, at least he's trying something—entirely the wrong thing but, regardless, something.

Anyway, Rick starts his killing/interrogation spree in New York, which definitely doesn't look like the city, even before we learn that most of the movie was shot in Little Rock, where Rick's crime lord father Jack (John Cusack) does his non-specific bad-guy stuff, and elsewhere in Arkansas. He kills a bunch of drug dealers, people barely connected to the cartel, and innocent bystanders alike, and the screenplay (written by the director, along with Dawn Bursteen, Ben Fiore, and Andrew Stevens) seems to let every other character in the movie forget about all of that by the end.

Mike, who oddly likes to look out from the balcony from which his wife was thrown to her death, catches Rick, who's extradited to Arkansas. The hacker's father, as well as a lot of Jack's competition, wants to capture and kill him for reasons that don't seem to matter to filmmakers. There's a lot of slow-motion shooting (really letting us see the cheapness of the props and the absence of effects), stunts chopped to edit around the fact that they forgot to hire a stunt performer (or saved some money on the budget by not doing so), and unconvincing fighting to be done (One goon appears to teleport from the wrong direction, and a scene of torture is rendered a joke by Skiba's inability to pull off a simple bit of trick perspective).

The plot—a generous term in this instance—features Rick being passed around, criminals double-crossing each other, and Mike trying to get to the bottom of a partner's killing. He's helped by local officer Zoe Carter, played by Elizabeth Faith Ludlow, who is perhaps the only actor in this mess to show some concern with coming away from this with some professional dignity intact. Considering that every character here is a thinly sketched cliché, it's difficult to directly blame any of the other actors, but Ludlow's natural ease and charm kind of makes the case that everyone else might have found some angle from which to work with this junky material.

Pursuit is junk. It's a movie devoid of any sense of skill and just about any sense of the meaning of fun—unless one enjoys making running lists and jokes of how many mistakes, terrible choices, and on-the-cheap shortcuts a single movie can make.

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