Proud Mary

I saw Proud Mary last night.  I was very much underwhelmed.

What?  Why should I put any effort in if the film didn’t?

It’s a story that’s been done before in different forms: a hitman (in this case, Taraji P. Henson) takes in a kid (in this case, a kid she’d orphaned a year ago during a hit on his father) and protects him while fending off external threats.  For this film, I was hoping to get something akin to a serious Black Dynamite, just throwing back to films like Coffee or Foxy Brown, rock that awesome Pam Grier groove.  Nope, no such stylization here, just generic “action” movie stuff.

Why the quotes, you ask?  Well, this thing positions itself as something of an action-thriller, possibly with the emphasis on the latter component, but it contains very little action and is too simple and boring to provide any amount of thrills.  Henson is mostly good, and she does show glimmers of what this film could have been (and what it purports to be) by giving us some short snips of badassery, but she’s stuck in a story that goes nowhere and doesn’t know how to do much of anything interesting.

The director of London Has Fallen shows that he barely understands how action movies work when the story is not quite as in-the-clouds.  Things are barely set up, actions often have little or no consequence, and the editing, oh the fucking editing!  Somehow this film shares the same editor as John Wick Chapter 2 (one Evan Schiff), but there he seemed to know what he was doing; had I not just looked up his filmography, I would’ve sworn he’d never edited anything before, not even a wedding montage.  Scenes just collide into one another, shots are inserted for no reason, the quality of the camera changes from shot to shot (the cinematographer, Dan Laustsen, is very accomplished, having directed photography for Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water (for which he’s nominated for an Oscar this year), and, funnily enough, John Wick Chapter 2, so I’m even more baffled by this dip in quality), and everything comes across looking rushed and cheap.  The script injects your basic action movie tropes without understanding that the setting doesn’t fit them, and hackneyed one-liners and exposition are bandied about with no regard for how horrible they sound.  And things just kinda happen: logic and a point are sorely missing, save for the script needing to have more pages.  My favorite comes at the end, when Henson has her gun trained on the antagonist, whose own gun is not raised, yet she doesn’t fire until making a ludicrous physical statement (I guess she’s showing her badassery and/or messing with his mind, but it just comes off as fucking inane) that makes him fire first.  It all could have ended so quickly and easily, saving us from more shithouse dialogue, but noooooo, that would be humane.

Even worse, the title song doesn’t open the film, as I expected (instead we’re treated to “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”, which, admittedly, still worked, thanks to its inherent funk); I then thought it wouldn’t come in ’til the credits, which it did, but only after it was featured in the beginning of the climax.  This hurt to watch, because the song only tangentially matched the action being displayed, and much of the song’s runtime was taken up with merely getting to the destination.  The incompetence knew no bounds!

Suffice it to say, this was a missed opportunity and a mess all around.  Almost nothing works, and the film doesn’t even succeed as a turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy-the-ride sort of experience.  Skip this one altogether: your time is better suited doing pretty much anything else.