Atos de Violência

Three brothers take on human traffickers after the youngest has his wife snatched after a night out with her girlfriends. The acting was passable; the script could have been made up as they went with just some ad-lib tough guy talk. There were some plot holes as expected with a B-grade action flick but nothing that a few shootouts couldn't overcome. Lots of angry people in this one but living in Cleveland might do that to a person. I've seen enough of Bruce Willis' latest movies to know that he'll basically make a cameo appearance so he doesn't need to be on set for more than a day or two. He gets his check and they can use his face to attract an audience. This followed the same scenario but at least he does get to shoot a few bad guys in this one. He had one facial expression the whole time...annoyance. I didn't go into it expecting much so I wasn't disappointed. A quick time-waster that won't strain your brain.

The first five minuites of this movie was great. The bond of the brothers protecting each other as children was great, and the VA scene was absolutely perfect. I have had the same experience with the VA. Unfortunately, after that, the story became fragmented. Honestly, it was a good story but the editing board must have had a hay day. It just jumped from scene to scene without many things being accounted for. The actors were not allowed to show their full range of emotions. If it was an 8 part mini series, it would have been great. The characters needed time to be explored more. If it had been longer, the action scenes could have been more developed. I like all the actors, and they probably did more in scenes that were left on the cutting room floor.

I never review movies here. All I want to say about this movie is that I was suspicious of this movie from the start. I was almost certain I was going to be turning this off after 5 or 10 minutes. But an hour in and I'm still watching it. I actually paused it to look something up about the movie, and happen to catch some of the reviews.

So I read in a few of them that this movie is basically a revenge fantasy for gun nuts(That's an actual quote(paraphrased) from one of the reviews). Well this isn't a spoiler, and I'm only saying it becuase it's only spoken for a second and then forgotten, but the 2 older brothers are rangers. That's all I have to say. The rest of the movie is exactly what would happen if 2 rangers had their sister kidnapped, and they knew where she was.

This is one of those movies you watch when there's nothing else to see. It's been (over)done many times before. The acting was better than expected, even for Bruce Willis who's been questionable in his past roles. The directing was the major issue here. This film lacked direction to the actors - it felt as if they were on their own in some scenes and in others the dialogue and action could have been better portrayed. Part of that was also the camera operator direction, again the directors job. The writing also had some plot issues and the editing could have been tighter. Never mind the lousy score throughout the film. 6.5/10 rounded up to a 7 for B-list actors doing a better than expected job.

Bruce has been pumping out some crud lately so I figured this was another addition to the awesome genre of films 'My face is on the cover but I ain't in the movie!'. He isn't the main driving force behind the picture but he is in it enough to count.

The movie does get more ridiculous as it goes but for some reason I was ok with that. Maybe I was in some kind of stupor because things were so much better than I had hoped?

I genuinely enjoyed the movie, Hauser was great in this (I had just finished re-watching Pitch Black so I was hating on him lol).

Give it a go :).