Mark Reviews Movies: VANQUISH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 15, 2021

As a movie, Vanquish doesn't have much of a story, and as an action movie, co-writer/director George Gallo's movie doesn't have much action, either. Gallo and co-screenwriter Samuel Bartlett don't give us much, and from the amount of footage that seems to have come from the B-roll, it's pretty obvious that Gallo is stretching to provide enough material for a 90-minute movie. Indeed, that notion is pretty apparent from the opening credits, which run about five minutes and offer a series of redundant newspaper headlines to fill in some basic back story.

There's so little here that a plot summary almost seems pointless. There's also the worry that to explain the plot would be to explain everything the movie has to offer, which isn't much in the first place.

Anyway, we're introduced to "America's cop" Damon (Morgan Freeman), a long-time and oft-decorated police officer whose career more or less ended after he was shot following an undercover mission (The department probably shouldn't have put a man who has appeared in headlines from the very start of his career in such an operation, and if we're already finding story problems in a throwaway montage during the opening credits, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the movie). Since then, a partially paralyzed Damon has turned crooked, running a bunch of illegal enterprises with the help of some dirty cops, a priest, and even the governor.

On this particular night, he has a series of money pickups to oversee, so Damon enlists his caretaker Victoria (Ruby Rose), a former assassin or something like that, whose daughter needs money for medical care for a likely fatal but unspoken illness. When she refuses her boss' offer to pay for the girl's treatment, Damon simply kidnaps the daughter (She ends up just being down the hall of his big mansion, which shouldn't be too much of an obstacle for her) and forces Victoria to make the five pickups.

This is the kind of movie that has so little happening within it that characters and voice-over flashbacks constantly remind us of what Victoria is doing and what she has left to do. Mere minutes after Damon explains her mission, we watch Victoria riding her motorcycle down the street (Be prepared for a lot of shots of her driving), and Damon's voice fills the soundtrack with a recap of everything he just said. The movie either assumes we're dumb or aren't paying attention, or the filmmakers are admitting right away that there isn't meat on the skeleton of this plot.

In case one happens to forget how many stops Victoria has to make or how many remain, Damon is right there, in her ear and at his out-of-the-way mansion (where Gallo repeatedly cuts back to Freeman staring at TV screens without any emotion), to remind her and us of that simple math. Yes, even though it makes no logistical sense, Victoria returns to Damon's home after picking up every single bag of cash, because, yes, the screenwriters have to stretch the plot out that much.

There's a side plot, too, involving some of Damon's crooked colleagues on the force (We meet them from the perspective of a rat, which is both an on-the-nose metaphor and a really distracting stylistic choice), who sit around waiting to see if an FBI agent has evidence against them. It goes nowhere, except to end the movie with an anticlimactic bang.

Mostly, though, we're watching Victoria drive, listening to Damon give directions and offer warnings about dangers he couldn't possibly see (She's wearing a camera on her jacket, but Damon can somehow see an entire room, even when it's established that someone is directly blocking the camera), and witnessing Victoria kill a whole bunch of people. Since she was once a criminal, there's someone who remembers her and has a reason to want her dead at every stop. It's no coincidence, but it's also unimportant, because, for as little plot as there is in this movie, there's even less of an attempt to fill in any character details or even the smallest gaps in that plot.

There are plenty of shootings, a couple of explosions, and a few car chases, which are clearly cut to pieces in order to hide the fact that the cars are driving at a safe speed (The constant flare of the brake lights can't be hidden, though). Vanquish is a dull, repetitive exercise in stretching too-thin material into something wholly transparent and almost completely pointless.

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