Redemption

"Redemption" marks the welcomed return of three action movie icons Richard Norton, Cynthia Rothrock, and Don Wilson - in an L.A. police drama about a SWAT cop (Wilson) who strays. Wilson acts recklessly on the job, endangering his partners, and rubs rulebook cop Norton the wrong way. Wilson's cowboy attitude causes the death of a colleague.

He loses his LAPD job and resorts to the underworld and a mob boss (Chris Penn) for the income he needs to stay afloat. Inevitably Wilson's lapse into crime collides with his former life and his friends on the Force. The movie's best heroic support comes from Norton, who effectively balances his character's integrity with the jealously he harbors for Wilson's higher rank. "Cybertracker" was the last Norton- Wilson pairing, in which they played adversaries, and this picture demonstrates that a movie can always use two great screen heroes. Though the screen time shared by martial arts legends Norton, Wilson & Rothrock is brief, "Redemption" will get an extended cheer from fans.

Tom (Richard Norton) and John (Don 'The Dragon' Wilson) can't decide who is the better leader, when a police squad is fighting drug dealers. The decisive moment is when Murphy (Cynthia Rothrock) is killed - John was responsible for putting her in danger, so he has to leave. He makes a new girlfriend, a high class hooker, and being out of work, the rather desperate John joins the bad guys for a 'job'. Ultimately he wants to redeem himself - as the title says, 'Redemption' is what it's all about. But that's a long way to go...

Great cast including Sam 'Flash Gordon' Jones, Chris Penn and James Russo and basically a good genre movie with not much action, but more attention to the characters. They are not simply good guys and bad guys, everyone has their shades of gray. Tom and John put their personal rivalry over the safety of the team sometimes. However, 'Redemption' doesn't manage to avoid the majority of clichés, you know: failed cop who drinks too much, hooker with a heart of gold etc, so I voted an undecided 5 of 10.

I'll say it right at the top: 'Redemption' feels like a movie that somehow got made while every person on hand - cast, crew, writer, director - was doing the bare minimum. "Half-hearted" is too charged a descriptor for the bland pablum this represents.

There are several noteworthy names in the cast. Writer Jack Capece doesn't have many credits to his name, but that's no guarantor of quality one way or the other; director Art Camacho has longer list of work under his belt, but that can go either way, too. For whatever 'Redemption' may have going for it, it doesn't take long to raise a skeptical eyebrow. From one scene to the next, regardless of the content or mood, the movie struggles to attain a basic level of authenticity. Action sequences are filmed with wildly flailing, unsteady camerawork and overzealous editing that is supposed to impart a synthetic variation of the excitement and thrills that should manifest organically in a good film. Frankly, it looks like the work of an amateur. The most noteworthy woman in the cast, Cynthia Rothrock, is reduced to a supporting part - for only part of the runtime - whose dialogue paints the character as a stereotype. For whatever minor wit the dialogue and scene writing may possess at large, it pales in comparison to what feels like a weak attempt to cut and paste lines and ideas from a checklist of underwhelming action/crime-thriller conventions.

I didn't have high expectations when I started watching, but still I'm left aghast at what I'd committed to. The concept isn't especially remarkable, but that doesn't mean it can't have possibilities. Yet writing and direction alike feel entirely blase, almost disinterested in their own production. Nothing about the screenplay makes much of an impression, and at many points it's altogether questionable; the narrative simply doesn't hold water. When action scenes aren't disorderly and unconvincing, they instead feel either staged and ungenuine, or possibly even stiff and wooden - nothing like the invigorating bombast one would hope for. However soft or loud the voices get, scenes of less active drama play out with a level of care, sincerity, and realism - or rather, lack thereof - that all but completely draws us out of the viewing experience. To one extent or another I've seen enough of the cast to understand their capabilities, but their acting here is helplessly flimsy, further splintering our engagement as we're unable to care about their characters any more than they do (and they don't).

With all this said, the plot is also light and thin in fundamental terms of content; some story threads are brought up, but never resolved. Yet 'Redemption' maintains a brisk pace. Before you know it the movie is half over, then only has a few minutes left, and it feels like almost nothing has happened all along. The climax arrives with astounding abruptness - and thankfully is over just as quickly, because it's one of the most poorly written and executed climaxes I can recall seeing in any movie.

I don't know what more to say without repeating myself and exhausting a thesaurus in the process. This is abhorrent. This is what happens when an assembly of people working in the film industry are pulled into a feature by one means or another, but none of them apparently have any meaningful investment beyond when they get their paycheck. And, hey - respect; everybody has to eat. But nobody has to watch 'Redemption.' Even if you're a diehard fan of someone in the cast, this is a mesmerizing, awful waste of 85 minutes.

Just don't.

Don (The Dragon) Wilson, Cynthia Rothrock, Sam J. Jones, Richard Norton, Chris Penn and James Russo are ultimately wasted in this failed cop drama which finds Wilson as a disgraced cop who ends up switching alliances to a mobster (Played well by Penn) after Wilson is out of work due to a mission that went awry and cost the life of one of his teammates. Redemption proves that Don Wilson is no longer the fierce martial artist that ruled the low budget martial arts scene in the Bloodfist movies, in fact Wilson has softened his approach and has tried to use his typically wooden presence to make the stretch as a corrupt cop. Wilson is somewhat effective in his performance although he ends up being too sympathetic and the movie needs an actor who isn't so goody-goody. Chris Penn and James Russo bring credibility to their performances and come off rather likable. The problem is that Penn and Russo have such little screen time that the movie has no impact outside of their sequences. Richard Norton, Cynthia Rothrock and Sam J. Jones are completely wasted in roles that could have been populated with wallpaper for all the affect they have. Plus there is hardly any martial arts fireworks one would expect from such an ensemble. Indeed one questions the approach taken with Redemption, since it aims for a police drama like Cop Land but ends up more like a hack version of clichés that repeat over and over again. The action sequences which would normally bail out the movie, are unexciting and stilted. Also the movie has a deadly dull subplot involving Wilson and a high class call girl which just consistently slows the movie down, movies like Redemption need first of all fleshed out characters and lots of screen time for the important characters to the plot, however because the movie treats the main story like an afterthought the movie fails on its own ambitions and satisfies no one in the process.

*1/2 out of 4-(Poor)

If you need a good laugh, you will find the opening scene very amusing.

The scene opens with a guy who is very sweaty and nervous sitting in on a drug deal in a crack house. If you do not find humor here. You probably don't have much of a sense of humor.