Film Review: Detective Knight: Rogue (dir by Edward Drake)

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Once upon a time, Casey Rhodes (Beau Mirchoff) was a football star. He was a quarterback. Everyone expected great things from him. He was going to be the next Tom Brady. But then a knee injury took him out of the game and a subsequent drug addiction took him out of mainstream society. Now, Casey makes his living pulling off robberies. He may be a criminal but he’s not a bad-hearted one. He may carry a gun but he tries not to shoot anyone who doesn’t shoot at him first. Working with him are a former baseball player named Mike (Trevor Getzky) and Nikki (Keeya King), who is the smartest member of the crew.

Despite Casey’s attempts to do his job with as little violence as possible, a gunfight does break out during one robbery in Los Angeles. When Detectives James Knight (Bruce Willis) and his partner, Eric Fitzgerald (Lochlyn Munro), interrupt the robbery, Fitzgerald ends up getting shot multiple times as Casey and his crew make their escape. With Fitzgerald in the hospital, Knight decides to follow the crew to New York and take out both them and their boss, a former Internal Affairs officer named Winna (Michael Eklund). It turns out that there’s a history between Knight and Winna. Knight wants his revenge on Winna but, at the same time, Winna knows some dark secrets from Knight’s past.

Though it works as a stand-alone film, 2022’s Detective Knight: Rogue is actually the first part of a trilogy that follows the adventures of Detective Knight. (Detective Knight: Redemption was released at the end of 2022 while Detective Knight: Independence came out last month.) The Detective Knight films were among the last of the movies in which Bruce Willis appeared before announcing his retirement. It can be strange to watch Willis’s final films, knowing what we know about what he was going through at the time that he made them. Though he’s definitely the star of the film, Willis is used sparingly in Detective Knight: Rogue and there’s little of the cocky attitude that we tend to associate with Willis’s best roles. Instead, he’s a grim avenger, determined to get justice for both his partner and himself. Willis is convincing in the role, even if the film is edited in such a way that the viewer gets the feeling that a stand-in may have been used for some of the long-shots involving Detective Knight. That said, Willis still looks convincing carrying a badge and a gun and it’s nice to see a Willis film where he’s again playing a hero instead of a villain.

As the football player-turned-thief, Beau Mirchoff gets more screentime than Willis but, fortunately, Casey is an interesting character and Mirchoff gives a strong performance as a criminal who would rather be a family man and who is desperately looking for a way to make up for the mistakes of his past. Towards the end of the film, he does a flawless job delivering a surprisingly well-written monologue about how he went from being a football star to being a common thief. Mirchoff’s strong performance adds a good deal of ambiguity to the film. The criminals aren’t necessarily that bad at heart and, as we learn, the good guys haven’t always been angels in the past. Detective Knight: Rogue becomes more than just another low-budget thriller. It becomes a meditation of regret and redemption.

Detective Knight: Rogue took me by surprise. As directed by Edward Drake (who was also responsible for another effective late Bruce Willis starrer, Gasoline Alley), it’s an intelligent thriller and it’s one that pays tribute to Bruce Willis as an action icon. It’s proof that a good story can sometimes be found where you least expect it.

Film Review: The Divide (dir by Xavier Gens)

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It seems like whenever there’s any sort of disaster, people are advised to seek shelter. Often, if the disaster is national news, people are told to take shelter in their basement, as if everyone in the world has a basement. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I live in North Texas, where the land is completely flat and no one has a basement, a cellar, or any other sort of underground shelter. (We also don’t have mud rooms and, in fact, I’m not even sure what a mud room is.)

That said, there’s a part of me that’s glad that it would be impossible for me to take shelter because, from what I’ve seen in the movies, it appears that spending months in a shelter can actually be worse than dying in a disaster.

Take the 2011 film, The Divide, for instance.

The Divide opens with several people watching while a mushroom cloud blooms over New York City. Eight of those people all end up taking shelter in the same basement. While that means that they don’t get incinerated by the nuclear blast, it also means that they now have to figure out how to live together. That’s not going to be easy because it doesn’t take long to realize that none of these people should be anywhere near each other.

For instance, there’s Mickey (Michael Biehn). Mickey’s the one who built the shelter. He says that he specifically built it so that, in case of a nuclear war or a terrorist attack, he could safely sit underground and laugh at everyone dying above him. That’s not a nice sentiment but Mickey is played by Michael Biehn so he’s still one of the more likable characters in the film.

There’s Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and his brother Adrien (Ashton Holmes) and their friend Bobby (Michael Eklund), three idiots who are clearly destined to end up going crazy before the ordeal is over.

There’s Eva (Lauren German) and her boyfriend, Sam (Ivan Gonzalez), who are both obviously destined to be the voices of reason to which no one is going to listen.

And then there’s Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her daughter (Abby Thickson), who are there because it’s not a shelter-movie without a child being put in jeopardy.

Lastly, there’s Devlin (Courtney B. Vance), who is there to be the older authority figure who ultimately fails to exercise much authority.

After an effectively chilling scene where the basement is briefly invaded by some mysterious men in Hazmat suits, The Divide settles down to be a fairly predictable and, to be honest, rather unpleasant examination of a group people going crazy from the stress of being trapped together. It may seem odd to complain that a film about the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse was unpleasant and I guess it is. But The Divide runs a little over two hours and it’s so relentlessly bleak and everyone is ultimately so nasty that it becomes a bit of a chore to sit through. By the time the torture scenes begin, The Divide has slipped into Hostel territory and it’s hard not to feel that the film is being grotesque simply for the sake of being grotesque.

That said, the film does have its strength. The shelter is an effectively claustrophobic location and Michael Biehn does what he can with the role of Mickey. When some of the characters end up getting radiation sickness, it creates some effectively scary visuals. I mean, if you ever thought it would be cool to poison yourself with radiation, this film will change your mind. That’s a good thing, I suppose.

The Divide is a very long movie about some very unpleasant people in an even more unpleasant situation. It’s well-made but not particularly entertaining to watch. In the end, it’s easy to feel that everyone would have been better off just staying above ground and getting it over with.

Horror Film Review: Nurse 3D (dir by Doug Aarniokoski)

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, last night, my boyfriend and I watched Nurse 3D because, based on the trailer that was released way back in January, we thought that it would be a sexy, fun, and enjoyably lurid movie. Do you remember that trailer? In case you need a reminder, here it is:

So, we finally got around to watching the movie and oh my God, you guys — sometimes trailers lie! I know, I know — it’s a shock. I’m still struggling to deal with it myself!

Actually, technically, the trailer for Nurse 3D doesn’t really lie. The trailer tells us that the film is about a nurse who is obsessed with another nurse and who spends the majority of the film wearing only a bra. And that’s true! But, somehow, the trailer also makes the film look like it’s a lot more fun than it actually is. The trailer reveals that Nurse 3D is meant to be something of a satirical tribute to the exploitation films of the past. What it doesn’t reveal is that the film largely does not work.

In Nurse 3D, Paz de la Huerta plays Abby Russell, a nurse who also happens to be a serial killer. When we first meet her, she’s wandering through a club in a black lace, see-through dress. In a narration that de la Huerta delivers in an emotionless drone, Abby explains that men are a disease that has been created in an “alcoholic petri dish” and that is now “infecting innocent vaginas.”

“There is only one cure for the married cock,” Abby tells us, “Only me. I’m the nurse.”

Abby, we discover, specializes in murdering married men who are on the verge of committing adultery. Sounds like a good idea for a movie, right? Well, don’t get too attached to it because, once we get through the opening credits, that entire storyline pretty much disappears.

Instead, Abby becomes obsessed with a new nurse named Danni Rogers (Katrina Bowden). One night, after Danni both has a fight with her boyfriend (Corbin Bleu) and gets yelled at by a jerk of a doctor (played by Judd Nelson), Abby invites Danni out to a club. Abby gets Danni drunk and drugged and soon they’re making out on the dance floor. The next morning, Danni wakes up in Abby’s bed. When Danni refuses to spend the day with Abby and quickly leaves, Abby reacts by trying to destroy Danni’s life…

And that plot line goes on for a while until, eventually, the filmmakers remembered that this was supposed to be a 3D film and, with the exception of one man hurtling towards the camera after being tossed off a rooftop, nothing in the film has really lent itself to whole 3D thing. So, suddenly, Abby goes from being coolly calculating to being batshit insane, essentially so that she’ll have an excuse to toss medical equipment straight at the camera.

(I’m going to guess that this all probably looked really impressive in 3D but since we were watching the film in 2D, who cares?)

And then, eventually, the movie ends.

I like what Nurse 3D was trying to do. The film is obviously meant to pay homage to the classic exploitation films to the past. That was obvious in everything from the overwritten narration to the hilariously fetishized nurses uniforms to the unapologetically sordid nature of the entire plot.

However, the film’s execution left a lot to be desired. For all of it’s attempts to celebrate over-the-top exploitation, the film never quite seems to understand what makes those films so memorable in the first place. Perhaps if Nurse 3D had stuck with being a film about a nurse who kills cheating husbands, the film would have worked. But, instead, it just becomes yet another film about an obsessive friend who turns out to be a psycho and who, fortunately for her, is lucky enough to be surrounded by people too stupid to pick up on the most obvious of clues.

And it doesn’t help that, whatever the joke was that Nurse 3D was trying to tell, it’s obvious that Paz de la Huerta was not in on it. In many ways, her character is meant to be a throwback to the great and deadly femme fatales of yesterday but it takes more than having a good body to be a femme fatale. You have to have style and that’s totally what her performance is missing. Scarlett Johansson could have worked wonders with the role of Abby Russell but Paz de la Huerta just seems to be lost.

That’s actually a pretty good description of Nurse 3D. It started out on the right track but, obviously, it lost its way.