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REPRISAL
Director: Brian A. Miller Cast: Frank Grillo, Bruce Willis, Johnathon Schaech, Olivia Culpo MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:35 Release Date: 8/31/18 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 30, 2018 An ordinary man does a lot of dumb things in order to hunt down a master criminal for no logical reason in Reprisal. The premise of Bryce Hammons' screenplay, in which a man with no investigative experience tries to outwit a clever and desperate thief, is intriguing. The execution of that idea, though, doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the premise's potential. Instead, we get a blandly normal guy named Jacob (Frank Grillo), the manager of a Cincinnati bank, who is left distraught after his workplace is robbed by a masked criminal, resulting in the death of a security guard. Jacob is put on temporary leave, which puts the financial security of his family—wife Christina (Olivia Culpo) and diabetic daughter (We just wait for the disease to cause additional complications during the climax, and naturally, it does)—in further jeopardy. The obvious motive for Jacob's ill-advised attempt to find the thief/murderer (played by Johnathan Schaech) would be money. There's a reward for information regarding his arrest, after all, but instead, his motive is personal and indistinct. He and his next-door neighbor James (Bruce Willis), the retired cop, don't even know about the reward until about the third minute of a seemingly endless montage of the two staring at photos and documents on a board. In case that sequence doesn't sound tedious enough, be appeased by the fact that director Brian A. Miller juxtaposes it with a separate montage of the criminal planning his next robbery, which amounts to him stalking and shooting mannequins in an abandoned factory for a few minutes. The rest is a game of cat-and-mouse, as Jacob puts himself in increasingly dangerous proximity to the thief, despite James giving him a police radio that would have the cops arriving in a matter of minutes (He waits until the last second to use it). Jacob is mostly useless in the pursuit, and ultimately, he puts his family at risk by taking the one thing the criminal wants more than anything else. Reprisal quickly becomes rather absurd. It doesn't help that every beat of the chase/eventual standoff is wholly predictable—right down to the inevitable moment that Willis' character stops sitting at home and picks up a shotgun. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for violence and language)
