Tuesday 21 December 2021

Vanquish (2021) - Movie Review


What makes a film “good”? What objective metric is there to judge whether a film qualifies as being “good” art? Does such a metric even exist? I have to ponder questions like these when I look at just about any film on here, and even though I am fully aware that “good” and “enjoyable” aren’t necessarily the same thing, I do try and highlight aspects of a film that work/don’t work when I’m mainly okay/not okay with the film as a whole, just to keep things balanced. And then I run into something like this, where whatever actual praise I can muster for it feels like I’m just insulting it even further, since all that talent is being buried by everyone else fucking up.

There isn’t so much a plot as much as there’s a single mission in a video game replayed until the end credits. We have Ruby Rose playing a former drug courier who is blackmailed by retired cop Morgan Freeman to visit five random locations around the city and pick up a bag full of money. Freeman spends the entirety of the film being Operator for Rose while she’s at work, monitoring her through a body-cam, and for a role that has him sitting in a chair for the whole run time, he’s at least trying to make it work. But damn it all, as much as I keep wanting to like Ruby Rose, this just makes for the latest instance of her being completely out-of-sorts in an action-oriented framework.

Then again, describing this as “action-oriented” is about as misleading as it gets, since the actual action scenes here… are there any? I’m not so sure that Ruby entering a room, talking, and then just head-shotting everyone else in the room in the space of a few seconds, really counts as an action scene. To say nothing of the motorcycle rides that act as loading screens between locations, which mainly consist of cross-fades to scenes we literally just saw, because filling up an hour and a half worth of screen-time is just too much to ask without recycling itself.

And that’s not the only direct-to-video B-movie tactic being used here, as Yvan Gauthier’s editing is up there with the worst I have ever covered on here, and possibly ever seen outside of that. Apart from those bloody cross-fades, and some of the most torturous uses of digital zoom ever committed by human hands, there’s a specific exchange that had me howling at how much of a hack-job it was. It involves Rose being held-up at gunpoint and someone saying to her “I don’t know whether I should kill you… or hire you”. Yes, the line on its own is lame already (and the rest of the dialogue is utter dross along with it), but the way it’s edited should serve as an inspiration to anyone out there who makes YouTube videos. No matter how self-conscious you may be about your own ability with videomaking, I can pretty much guarantee that you will never be as shit as that awkward-as-fuck edit.

But the worst part about all this is that there is at least someone who is giving their all to this production: Cinematographer Anastas N. Michos. No matter what film he’s attached to, whether it’s Texas Chainsaw 3D, The Empty Man, or the Kissing Booth trilogy, he has shown incredible talent in making even the dumbest stories look nice. And with this production, he has his work cut out for him because there’s not a whole lot actually going on in-film. But through some trippy framing, a nice colour palette, and some proper creativity in the shots used (like a shakedown scene shown from the POV of a literal rat in the same room), he gives the film an actual… well, film quality that everyone else has neglected, writer/director George Gallo included. Yeah, I was willing to hear him out when he remade The Comeback Trail, but yikes, dude.

This is almost impressive in how shithouse it is, a fact made even more laughable by how at least some of these people are trying their damnedest to make this watchable. But no matter how hard the DP, Morgan Freeman, and hell, even Ruby Rose are making the best out of a bad situation, the rest of the dreadful cast, the lacklustre ‘action’, the do-nothing plot, and the kind of editing that makes Doobie White look sensible, all drag this production down to the point where it might be alright for bad movie night, but even that is probably giving this film too much credit.

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