SUNRAY - Mark Reviews Movies

Sunray, Vertigo Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 23, 2025

The selling point of Sunray is that it was made by and stars former members of the Royal Marines. It's a solid bit of marketing for a generic action movie that's mainly notable for its questionable moral core. Co-writers/co-directors James Clarke and Daniel Shepherd eventually get around to addressing that uncomfortable point, which suggests violent and homicidal vigilantism is a necessity, but since this story is all about action and revenge, the movie isn't exactly in any position to examine its themes or its characters in any meaningful way.

Take our protagonist Andy (Tip Cullen), whom we first see killing multiple anonymous people involved in the illegal drug trade with a team of other retired Marines. The only context to the sequence is death, with Andy's squad shooting anyone—armed, unarmed, trying to stop them or not—whom they come across. There's a reason Andy is so intent on killing anyone and everyone involved in drugs, which we learn later. For now, the scene just looks like an unmotivated massacre, and the filmmakers assume we'll be on board for it.

One's mind quickly goes to the vigilante thrillers of the 1970s, and it's a bit disconcerting that such a philosophy has returned in the present day. Watching it is to think of various autocrats and wannabe political strongmen who call for such extralegal violence to be taken against both those involved in the illicit drug trade and those whose addictions are encouraged by it. The screenplay, also co-written by Sam Seeley, at least draws the line at the latter, it seems, but since the overwhelming majority of the targets here are just nameless and faceless participants in the drug business at some level, it's not as if the filmmakers care about the circumstances of any of those figures—even the ones who pose no obvious threat to our protagonists.

The movie does pay some lip service to the notion that, maybe, Andy especially and his team have taken their mission too far. There is the voice of pseudo-reason in Smudge (Tom Leigh), who occasionally questions his former squad leader's vigilante acts but goes along with them all regardless. The tone here is just as broken, too, with such concerns immediately dismissed by some comic relief and the notion that Andy is psychologically devastated before going to war against the drug business undermined by the gung-ho nature of the action.

Clarke and Shepherd primarily seem to care about the last element of this narrative, which is quite straightforward, despite some odd editing and the half-hearted attempts to understand Andy outside of the bloodshed. As hinted at earlier, it is a revenge tale, because Andy's daughter Rachel (Saskia Rose) dies from an apparent drug overdose almost immediately after she's introduced. There's a consistent thread of dismissively using women in this story in a similar way, whether that be Andy's ex-wife Elaine (Karlina Grace-Paseda) telling her former spouse how much he meant to their daughter, before the ex-wife also becomes a plot device, or his therapist (played by Gemma Knight Jones) being quite ineffective, while also making sure her prompts give us Andy's back story.

One almost has to ignore everything surrounding the fundamentals of the plot and the action sequences to see this material for what it is. The filmmakers ignore most of that other stuff, too, leaving us with little else to which to attach.

After his daughter's death, Andy decides to find and, of course, kill the people who provided the drugs at the party she was at (not to mention anyone else in the area, apparently), before following the trail to whoever's at the top of the drug hierarchy. He's rescued by Smudge and some other former commandos, whose assumption that Andy will take matters into his own hands should probably give them some pause. Soon enough, they're killing more people in assorted, deserted locales, before Lucian (Kevin Golding), the big guy at the top of chain, tries to stop them.

If one can get past the wanton killing and the morally dubious motives surrounding it, the action here is staged well enough, and the actors who make up the central team (also consisting of characters played by Luke Solomon and Steven Blades) are fine in their roles. Cullen does bring some degree of complexity to Andy, a man traumatized by decades of war who has received no useful aid in his civilian life. If there's a point here about veterans or the psychological ramifications of combat being overlooked, it's lost amidst the movie's one-track mind toward action, briefly diverted in a series of thematic dead ends.

At its core, Sunray is a competent actioner, and because of its messy efforts to be a bit more than that, it's tough to outright dismiss the movie as some kind of endorsement of the actions on display here. Because it is so thematically muddled, though, it's much tougher to say the movie is effective, either.

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