This production is something of a meeting-of-the-minds for two creatives attached to some of the first films I ever reviewed on here. There’s director Renny Harlin, who gave us the raw forgettability of The Legend Of Hercules (and is also the guy who helped kill pirate cinema as a mainstream genre until Jack Sparrow showed up), and then there’s co-writer Kurt Wimmer, who managed to make the Point Break remake even more dated than the original, and who specialises in aggressively style-over-substance action flicks. This review is more a matter of curiosity than anything else, but even knowing their respective histories in the business, I still wasn’t prepared for just how atrocious this team-up would turn out.
I don’t usually come across films where every single actor is a bad fit. Pierce Brosnan spends so much time showing how his character doesn’t want to be here that I’m pretty sure no acting was involved, Hermione Corfield and Jamie Chung are bland beyond recognition, Mike Angelo has some personality on-screen but it doesn’t work with the overall tone and energy of the narrative, and Tim Roth as the villain tries to sell it as the only person in the room with a working brain, but he again can’t find a good rhythm with his surroundings.
And then there’s Nick Cannon, in what might the single worst performance I’ve seen all year, if not the last few. Aside from how his constant narration keeps breaking the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule, he is astonishingly annoying in all regards, whether it’s just his voice, his physical presence, or his regular excursions into blatant stereotyping with his ‘disguises’. You know you’re watching a bad movie when you need to mentally work out what is more offensive: Campy gay mincing that’s at least three decades behind the times, or an overly phlegmy Arab sheik.
Where it gets worse is with how they technically make sense as far as the larger narrative, since this is where heist capering and true-blue idiot plotting collide to create one of the most threadbare ‘please think we’re cool, please, please think we’re cool’ stories imaginable. It tries to go for a 6 Underground vibe with its main cast of morally-ambiguous criminals who are trying to do good in their own specialised way (stealing gold bars from terrorists to aid in a refugee crisis), combined with a bit of Fast & Furious globe-trotting, but no-one here really gives the impression that there’s enough to their characters for that kind of greyness. I mean, their main plan involves evacuating half the inmates of a prison due to food poisoning (in a sequence desperately aiming for gross-out humour and failing to get any laughs); they’re not the best humanitarians I’ve seen, I must say.
I didn’t really know what to expect going into this, but I didn’t think that it was possible to fail this badly at such a simple fucking idea. Calling this disposable is less a qualitative statement and more a strong suggestion, since I can’t think of a single thing about this disaster that’s worth sticking around for, even for ironic reasons. This is the worst thing to be associated with the word 'Misfits' since Danzig Sings Elvis.
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