The Contractor

Danny Trejo if s what makes this movie so good. The movie is a thriller and with a simple plot but tense in parts and with good acting. It held my attention throughout and is a good away-from-thinking movie.

I try to lower my expectations for most films on Lifetime, because you have to suspend some disbelief for anything low budget. This is not a rip on quality, however, because you can find some gems as long as the story lines are strong.

It was hard to overlook many things about "The Contractor", a revenge suspense film that takes place in Los Angeles. Starring Danny Trejo as an angry contractor, he seeks some sort of retribution for the prison death of his wrongfully incarcerated son. There should be a lesson here about wrongful incarceration, especially in today's climate, but "The Contractor" carelessly hides any opportunity to make a statement by using it as a springboard for a weak story about revenge and a wealthy couple with stables and an overflowing toilets.

Trejo's talents are wasted, if only because of the careless scripting. To gain access to the prosecutor's house, he uses a false name. In trying to find his true identity, the prosecutor's wife and a friend use the internet to zero in on his true identity - - a task that takes less than :10 seconds -- from the over millions of Hispanics in Southern California. If you lived in LA, you'd understand the impossibility of such a web search. In describing Trejo's son to the prosecutor's anguished wife, she uses the term "Latin princes" instead of "Latino" -- another blatant error.

In fact, the whole concept of justice and vengeance makes no sense. Prosecutor unjustly gains a conviction for an innocent young man who dies in a prison fight. Father is angry and wants a little revenge. Instead, he gets fired. Prosecutor's wife discovers that her husband might not care that there was some sort of unjust conviction. Prosecutor hires some thugs to try to beat up Danny Trejo's character. In turn, a botched abduction takes place. No matter how the film turns out, the prosecutor never understands that he is wrong.

What a waste.

There was just something fundamentally 90's about this thriller. And I mean that in the best possible way actually. It was like watching the thrillers that I remember watching during the 90's.

That being said, then "The Contractor" was actually entertaining and did have an interesting story. The story, though, wasn't particularly thrilling or disturbing, but it was told in a nice way and the plot was great. And this made for a rather enjoyable movie.

It should be said that "The Contractor" is the type of movie you watch once and never again, because the storyline and plot doesn't have enough contents or leverage to support more than a single watching.

The story is about the Chase family who have moved into a new home - a home that needs some renovating. Paul Chase (played by Brad Rowe) gets a tip from a friend about a cheap contractor, and after having discussed this with his wife Elizabeth (played by Christina Cox), they hire Javier Reyes (played by Danny Trejo) to do the work around their new home. However, this contractor has an ulterior motive.

The acting in the movie was quite good, and the three leads did carry the movie quite nicely.

The fighting scenes in the movie were quite wooden and badly choreographed, coming off a rather amateurish and forced. But, given the storyline and plot, then this is a small matter that hardly impacts the movie. And luckily there aren't a lot of fighting in the movie.

"The Contractor" is a straight forward thriller that follows a rather simple blueprint, but it works out nicely and gets the work done.