Survive the Game

I keep chucking out the newest Bruce Wills movies because I get so damn curious about them and they all suck. Cosmic Sin, Midnight in Switchgrass, Breach, 10 Minutes Gone, Reprisal, The Prince, Hard Kill, Out of Death. All crappy Bruce Willis films made within the last few years. What happened to this guy? He has no passion left for the craft of acting. Hes hardly trying. Why even continue?

Oh well lets dive into this film called Survive the Game. The film is about two cops (Bruce Wills and Swen Temmel) bust two villains (Zach Ward who was the bully in A Christmas Story and some girl looking a lot like Harley Quinn) doing some kind of deal. I really did not catch what the deal is or what crime they were committing. The movie explains nothing. Willis gets shot in the gut and expresses very little pain. Its like Tim Roth is Reservoir Dogs if he didnt care. Hes wounded for the whole film but its not like it matters. More bad guys chase the cops through land occupied by a man who lost his family (Chad Michael Murray) and they get into multiple non exciting shootouts and lame car chases where its mostly two cares going kinda fast in a straight line. The film is padded with long drawn out dull dialog yet hardly explains any plot.

The real heart of this film is Bruce Willis not caring. Its rather funny how much he does not care. Its like he was at gunpoint while being in this film. Sometimes its not even him in the film. There are clearly double sitting in for Bruce in many scenes. And the cherry on top is that on the poster to the film his picture is the same one they used in Midnight in Switchgrass!

2/10.

Just repeat it often enough, and eventually it will happen: One day Bruce Willis will make a good movie again One day Bruce Willis will make a good movie again One day Bruce Willis will make a good movie again One day Bruce Willis will make a good movie again One day,...

Okay maybe not.

This movie here, as so many of his recent outings, is bottom of the barrel low budget fare, though unlike Midnight in the Switchgrass, this one was botched from the concept stage on. It could have worked as a kind of "Die Hard on a farm" type movie. That would have been really clever.

Switch the role of the farmer to Willis. He's an old Vietnam or desert storm vet or retired cop. Switch the role of the young cop with Willi's hostage character. The young cop chases the bad guys to the farm, gets injured in the process and becomes their hostage.

The bad guys call for backup, Willis has to Die Hard his way to victory. Of course this would mean Willis would have to do some action work instead of spending the entire movie sitting down in a chair.... Add a ticking clock element by having Willis daughter and family be scheduled to visit in a few hours. Willis has to defeat the bad guys before that happens, forcing him to take undue risks.

Instant drama.

Instead we get Willis sitting in a chair for almost the entire movie, no name cop character who's not even on the cover killing most of the bad guys, two main heroes who don't really work together for most of the film, with neither of them really an audience avatar, and villains so incompetent they make Wile E. Coyote look like a genius.

How dumb are the the bad guys. In more than one scene, they have loaded guns / rifles in their hands, approach the heroes from afar and try to use the guns and clubs. It's that bad.

The final death of the main villain happens off screen with an awkward cutaway, since they couldn't be arsed to pay for a dummy body in a shirt to take a fall onto grass from a 1st floor balcony.

Add to this a cavalcade of bad film making tropes: Awkward dubstep / rap score, shaky cam action scenes, lens flares where there shouldn't be any, and eye cancer color grading.

This is actually why I gave it 3 stars. It enters "so bad it's good" territory. It's fast moving enough to not bore you too much between laughs. Whether it's Willis mumbling his lines while sitting, at one point even saying "I will gladly sit down" to actresses with botched plastic surgery, deliciously bad acting from all except the main villain (the henchman, not the GQ model cartel boss), and even a Harley Quinn knockoff character complete with goth makeup, blonde hair and heart tattoo under her eyes.

Lawsuit from Warner incoming.

Unironically, the last word in the film, spoken by Willis, sums up the entire movie: "excrement" (he uses a four letter word).

I can cut some slack for newb writer Ross Peacock in his first full length screenplay, with only seven prior short films, because he clearly has no idea on how to write a full length story without tons of filler and long dragged out and unnecessary scenes. The normally decent 97 min runtime felt ridiculously long. About 80% of this film was infantile cat and mouse games, and the worst car chases in the history of car chases.

Whoever funded this mess and after viewing the final cut said "that's great, let's go to market" clearly needed a tax write-off. This may have been bearable had Peacock cut out lots of film and kept his story as a short, no more than 25 mins. Even his attempt at any humor was cringeworthy. He pretty much didn't miss any cliche in this genre, and we really didn't need another cops vs bad guys story.

But were there is no forgiveness, is how seasoned director James Cullen Bressack presented us this garbage. Why did he give us the lamest long car chases in the world? The choppy blurred action sequences? The horrible camera work? Did he even direct his cast? A 5th grader could've directed better.

Then we have Willis in his usual has-been acting with him barely awake and smirking his monotonic lines. This guy is moving backwards in time with any acting skills or ability. Stay home Bruce, please. All other casting was also lame and unconvincing, with the exception of Chad Michael Murray who was decent, and in very distant second place, Swen Temmel. Kate Katzman and Zack Ward as unoriginal wannabe Harley Quinn and the Joker characters was cringe, although their performances were the most entertaining.

The only redeeming quality was the score and soundtrack, which were decent compared to other typical B grade films where they're loud, constant, overbearing and unfitting. I'd pass on this mess, and because I didn't have to force myself that hard to stay awake until the end, it's a generous 3/10 from me.

Bruce Willis shines with bad acting. It's like he doesn't care proper acting at all anymore. It seems to be a trend, older top actors who take less and less roles as they get older. Not worth watching in my opinion.

Man oh man... do I ever learn? What an awful film. Every time I say enough, I will never watch another BW film, I do it again. He can't act for toffee and this is another successful attempt of him being a trash actor.