RUMBLE THROUGH THE DARK - Mark Reviews Movies

Rumble Through the Dark, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

Rumble Through the Dark is about as subtle as a neon casino sign broken to spell "sin" in the middle of a fight, which is a thing that happens in this movie. It's also about as competent as the fact that one of the letters of that sign continues to be illuminated in certain shots, even after it has been busted during the brawl. Yes, pointing out such little inconsistencies is basically nitpicking, but when it's at the heart of a piece of such blatant symbolism, one might as well pick away.

The straightforward part of this tale centers on Jack "the Butcher" Boucher (Aaron Eckhart), a bare-knuckle fighter who's past his prime but barely making a living by taking the fall in matches in a convincing manner. Those two qualities don't really add up, because surely people can figure out that the guy, who ambles around with a constant hunch, isn't likely to win, regardless if he throws the match or not, but such details don't matter to screenwriter Michael Farris Smith.

The important thing is that Jack is basically finished with his career as a fighter, and he doesn't have much to show for it, except that awful posture, which Eckhart leans into with such distracting enthusiasm that it at least keeps us from hearing how often his Deep South drawl drops over the course of his dialogue. Eckhart is typically a sturdy actor, capable of some quiet and nuanced work at his best, but here, he's given material that shuns notions like quiet nuance. The directors, brothers Graham and Parker Phillips, don't seem to have much patience for it, either.

Jack's current situation is that he's deeply in debt to crime boss Big Momma Sweet (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who is even better than this material than the movie's star and at least gets the job done as a threateningly ruthless gangster). He owes her about $12,000, makes that money by betting his ill-gotten fight cash at the casino, and, despite knowing that Big Momma has a target on him because of the symbolism-creating brawl at the gambling joint, ends up losing the money to yet another guy who tries to beat him up and bring him to the crime boss.

All the confusion could have resolved with a simple phone call, which we know Big Momma would take. Where's the potential for an unnecessarily convoluted plot, though, in making simple, smart decisions when one's life and livelihood are on the line?

Anyway, the money ends up in the hands of Annette (Bella Thorne), an exotic dancer working with a traveling carnival—one that just happens to be arriving in town and passing the cornfield where Jack is robbed, leaves the thief to die after crashing his truck, and wanders off in a dazed state before retrieving that life-saving money. Her story seems to have absolutely nothing to do with Jack's beyond the money, but since coincidence and convenience seem to be primarily on Smith's mind, Annette might actually have a connection to Jack. She discovers that, by the way, because some random woman arrives to tell Jack his life story when Annette is there to overhear it.

If one can ignore the mess of a plot—which also crams some flashbacks of Jack's childhood with his adoptive mother (played by Virginia Newcomb), who's currently in a nursing home because Jack also owes money to bank for her house—that just keeps becoming messier, there are a few positive elements here. The Phillips brothers imbue the alternately loud and sappy material with a fine sense of dim and muggy atmosphere, especially at Big Momma's compound, an old plantation where we expect a lot of people arrive but a fewer number are allowed to leave. The locations feel soaked in heat, from the sun and the random things on fire at the compound, and drenched in sweat, and when the story does settle down a bit with the extraneous contrivances and focuses on the main stakes at hand, the actors revel in the tit-for-tat dialogue, like something out of a more competent Southern neo-noir.

Instead, Rumble Through the Dark is more akin to overblown pulp with wholly unconvincing streak of unearned sentimentality. Yes, the tone here is all over the place, too, but that shouldn't come as much of a surprise, considering how inconsistent the movie's plot, characters, and basic filmmaking are.

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