Mark Reviews Movies: REDEMPTION DAY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 7, 2021

Redemption Day spends a long time building up toward its inevitable climax, an extended siege of a terrorist compound in Algeria. Then again, to say the story "builds" toward that climax is a bit of an error. The screenplay by director Hicham Hajji, Sam Chouia, and Lemore Syvan sets up its major complication and then delays the gun-happy finale for as long as it can.

There's some intriguing material here, established pretty quickly and then remaining static until a lot of shooting resolves the plot, without expanding upon or resolving much else. Our hero is a U.S. Marine officer named Brad Paxton (Gary Dourdan), who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after he and his team were attacked during a humanitarian mission in the Middle East.

Something terrible happened, but Hajji's decision to parcel out the attack in scattered flashbacks, shot with a dedication to handheld chaos over comprehension, ensures that we're never certain what happened exactly. The filmmakers don't give us any emotional or psychological connection to the protagonist, and their rationale seems wholly cynical in retrospect. There simply isn't any obvious action in this story until the end, so they have to include it somehow and somewhere.

Brad receives the Medal of Honor for his heroism in the mission we neither really see nor understand, and while he battles the nightmares of trauma, his wife Kate (Serinda Swan), a professor or something, is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to excavate a previously undiscovered human civilization in Morocco. She goes.

Her team, accidentally crossing the border into Algeria, is ambushed by a terrorist group looking to earn some credibility, and the survivors are taken hostage. Brad is determined to rescue his wife, no matter the cost.

That's all of the plot, but the screenwriters certainly offer some unnecessary distractions of political and cultural intrigue to try to convince us that there's more to the story than just that. Some of it revolves around the U.S Ambassador (played by Andy Garcia, who mostly seems to be enjoying some cigars while reading his lines from prompts just off-camera) and a vaguely sinister underling (played by Martin Donovan), who doesn't like the diplomat's decision to keep Brad in the loop about the abduction and to look the other way when the hero goes rogue.

The underlying political concern here has to do with a briefly mentioned vote, which apparently could shift the balance of power in the region. If a text prologue and a final scene (featuring a ludicrous caricature of a Southern oil lobbyist and filled with so much exposition that we half expect the movie to go on for another hour) are any indication, all of this is about oil. As for what the filmmakers actually want to say about the political and economic forces at play behind the scenes of their story, that's a matter they either forgot about or want to save for what seems like a planned sequel.

Most of this story, though, is just about Brad trying to find the terrorists who captured his wife. He gets help from Younes (Brice Bexter), a former U.N. peacekeeper whom Brad rescued during the mission from the prologue and the flashbacks, who connects the protagonist with assorted (and mostly useless) helpers and accompanies him to Algeria.

There's a series of scenes involving local Muslims, who seem to be in cahoots with the terrorists but ultimately condemn them as twisting Islam. It's a fine and almost necessary sentiment, of course (The terrorist group, led by an almost-foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath, would otherwise be the movie's only representation of anything approaching Islam), but it's certainly undermined by the fact that these scenes are completely pointless. Brad and Younnes simply find the bad guys' headquarters by following a car that had been following them. "That was almost too easy," Brad notes, and he's mostly right. It's laughably too easy.

The remainder of the movie is an extended shootout. It's less a dynamic action sequence and more a shooting gallery. The sequence begins with Brad and Younes stealthily picking off enemies, and then, it's just a bunch of noise. Bad guys pop around corners or up on rooftops for easy target practice for the heroes, and we start to wonder just how many people are in this compound. The answer seems to be: as many as are required to keep the scene going as long as possible.

The climax is about as dull and repetitive as the rest of Redemption Day. It has a clear point to make and accomplish, at least, which is more than can be said of the movie as a whole.

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