Novel Review: Divine Assassin by Bob Reiss

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After terrorists kill his fiancée for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Tim Currie is determined to get justice. Unfortunately, the police can offer him little support and the U.S. intelligence community doesn’t seem to be interested in helping him either. The problem is that the attack that led to the death of Currie’s fiancée was ordered by someone who doesn’t live in the United States and who doesn’t have the slightest concern about the innocent people who have died as a result of his actions. Realizing that he is going to have to get justice on his own, Currie turns to the only man that he feels that he can trust.

Long before his fiancée was murdered, Tim Currie was one of the many Americans held hostage in Iran. During that time, he had two friends, a mouse who was callously killed by a brutal guard and a cellmate who was frequently tortured for being a spy. His cellmate may have used the name Charles Murphy but he was actually a mercenary named Zarek. The amoral Zarek owes Currie a favor and Currie intends to collect. He wants Zarek to train him to be an assassin so that Currie can kill the man that he holds responsible for his fiancée’s death, Libyan dictator Muammar Quaddafi!

As you probably already guessed, this book was written long before the Libyan Civil War and the real-life Qaddafi’s very public execution in 2011. Indeed, Divine Assassin was originally published in 1985! Reading it today, it’s interesting to see that, nearly 40 years ago, people were just as concerned with and confused by Middle Eastern politics as they are today. Other than the fact that the Qaddafi on the book is described as being in his 40s, what we read about the fictional Qaddafi pretty much mirrors what was said of the real Qaddafi in the days before his death. Of course, needless to say, there’s more going on in this book than just Tim Currie’s search for vengeance and Qaddafi’s amazing arrogance. It quickly turns out that there’s quite a few people and nations looking to use the instability in the Middle East to their advantage and again, it’s interesting to see that the discussion around the Middle East really hasn’t changed that much over the past few decades.

As for the book itself, it’s an entertaining and relentlessly paced thriller, one that features a sympathetic protagonist and several memorable supporting characters. The cynical Zarek (who also happens to be terminally ill) gets all of the best lines while two other Americans, a police inspector and Currie’s ex-wife, try (and often fail) to serve as a voice of reason to Currie’s obsessive attempts to get revenge. The villains are memorably evil, with a German assassin especially making himself so loathsome that the reader will eagerly look forward to his comeuppance. The dialogue is often sharp and there are moments of unexpected wit to be found throughout the book. All in all, this a good and quick read. It would have made a good movie. Actually, it still could. It’s not like Qaddafi was ever the only terrorist-supporting dictator in the world.

January Positivity: Forever and a Day (dir by Zeke Jeremiah)

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In a small Texas town, life seems to be going as it always does.

High school freshman Daniel (Keegan Bouton) spends most of his time hanging out with his best friend, Haley (Charlotte Delaney Riggs). They walk around town together. They explore the woods together. They talk about their first year in high school and which teachers they like and which they dislike. When they see one of their classmates getting picked on by a group of bullies, Haley wants to do something to stop it while Daniel argues that there’s nothing they can do.

Besides, they have an even more pressing concern. Haley’s mother (Mercedes Peterson) has begun to flirt with Daniel’s father (Trey Guinn)! In a well-written and well-acted scene, they sit in a car and watch as Haley’s mom talks to Daniel’s dad and both of them discuss the things that their parents do while flirting, just to watch in silent horror as their parents proceed to do every one of those things. Though they may be best friends, they’re still a little bit creeped out by the idea of their parents dating. Daniel, especially, still thinks that his father and mother might someday get back together.

From the start, the viewer is aware that something tragic is going to happen. The town is too perfect and Haley and Daniel’s friendship is too heartfelt for there not to be a tragedy waiting around the corner. And, from the minute we see poor Colby (Holdan Mallouf) getting pushed around by Travis (Blaze Freeman) and his gang, we can pretty much guess what that tragedy will involve. It’s just a question of who, amongst the character that we’ve met, will be unlucky enough to be in the hallway when Colby finally snaps.

It may sounds melodramatic but, unfortunately, it’s also an honest portrayal of the fears that everyone has when it now comes to high school. School shooting are a tragedy that few of us can get our heads around, which is one reason why people are often more interested in using them to score political points than to actually discuss the events that led up to each shooting and the culture that produced them. This film does a good job of examining the aftermath of the shooting and the struggle of people to understand both how it could have happened and how it could have been prevented. This film emphasizes love and faith as a way to both deal with tragedy and to combat the anger and depression that leads to it happening. No one was willing to stand up for Colby and the only person who shows any real concern for him was led away by her best friend.

(I do have to say that I cringe a little bit whenever school shooters are portrayed as just being stereotypical nerds who snapped because the bullies wouldn’t leave them alone. That describes a few school shooter but it certainly doesn’t describe shooters like Nikolas Cruz, Adam Lanza, or the two Columbine shooters. Portraying any kid who is picked on as being a ticking time bomb just further stigmatizes the socially awkward.)

Forever and a Day is a low-budget film and it’s hardly flawless. (I could have done without the narrator.) But, at the same time, it deals with a difficult subject with emotional honesty and the cast does a good job inhabiting their characters. In the end, it’s a film that asks all of us to treat each other with kindness and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Retro Television Reviews: Hang Time 3.7 “Julie’s Guy” and 3.8 “Playing With Pain”

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Hang Time, which ran on NBC from 1995 to 2000. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

I’ll always remember….

Episode 3.7 “Julie’s Guy”

(Directed by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on October 4th, 1997)

Because Julie is incapable of doing anything that doesn’t somehow involve basketball, she is dating yet another basketball player. You would think that she would have learned her lesson after Chris cheated on her and then Josh mysterious disappeared after the end of Season 2. Of course, Chris and Josh were both teammates of Julie’s. This time, Julie is dating Jason Redman, who plays for another team!

Needless to say, the other Tornadoes are not happy about this. They’re not sure if they can trust Julie to put aside her feelings and play as a member of the team. This is a pretty stupid concern. Julie has been the show’s main character for two and a half seasons and we still don’t know a thing about her beyond the fact that she plays basketball and she brags nonstop about winning.

Once again, the Tornadoes play terribly for the first half of the game. Fortunately, Fuller takes the time to yell at them in the locker room. Everyone realizes they can trust Julie. The Tornadoes go on to win by one point. For all the bragging this team does, continually winning by only one point really isn’t that impressive. Most good teams can actually win by several points.

Anyway, this one was pretty forgettable. I have a feeling that we’ll probably never hear another word about Julie dating Jason.

Episode 3.8 “Playing with Pain”

(Directed by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on October 4th, 1997)

Coach Fuller is gone again and Assistant Coach Keelor (Todd Fraser) is in charge of the team. The last time that Fuller was absent from the show, during the Fighting Words episode, it was explained that it was because he had the mumps. This time, no explanation is given for Fuller’s absence. I’m going to guess that Fighting Words and Playing With Pain were envisioned as airing back-to-back but that NBC showed them out-of-order. This is something that NBC frequently did with its TNBC shows and, as a result, the continuity of these shows were always out-of-whack. Its almost as if NBC just didn’t care.

Anyway, at the start of this episode, Keelor announces that a scout is coming from the University of Arizona to watch Michael play. The scout turns out to be someone named David Stoudemire. By the way the audience goes crazy whenever he shows up in a scene, I’m guessing he was a basketball player. Like most of the real-life basketball players who showed up on Hang Time, Stoudemire was hopefully better at playing basketball than acting.

Anyway, Michael really wants to impress the scout but, while practicing with Julie, he seriously sprains his ankle. (Even though it looks like it was Michael’s fault because of the way he landed, I’m still going to blame Julie. Julie was so upset over not being the center of attention that she goaded Michael into practicing too hard, knowing that he would end up spraining his ankle.) Worried that he’ll be benched if he tells anyone that he’s injured, Michael tries to play through the pain. This is something many pro athletes have done. From personal experience, I can tell you that this is also something that many dancers have done. I hurt my ankle so many times when I was younger that it was probably more of a surprise when I didn’t injure it than when I did. You take a bunch of pain killers and then you do the best you can before passing out in the dressing room afterwards. However, since this is a TNBC show, Michael dramatically reinjures himself while playing basketball and ends up screaming in pain while everyone watches. In the locker room, both Assistant Coach Keelor and David Stoudemire tell him that he’s a dumbass.

Bye bye, Arizona!

The Eric Roberts Collection: Deadline (dir by Curt Hahn)

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the year 1993, a black teenager named Wallace Sampson was shot and murdered in the small town of Amos, Alabama. The murderer was never caught. In fact, according to most people in the town, the murder was never even really investigated. The town’s white leaders, many of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan, swept the murder under the rug.

20 years later, Trey Hall (Lauren Jenkins) is determined to solve Wallace’s murder. Trey may be the daughter of the richest man in town but, as she puts it, she was practically raised by Wallace’s mother, Mary Pell Sampson (Jackie Welch). Mary Pell Sampson is the long-time maid of Trey’s father, Everett Hall (David Dwyer). When journalist Matt Harper (Steve Talley) comes down from Tennessee to do a story on another murder, Trey tells him that he should totally ditch the recent murder and instead investigate the older murder. Matt, who is currently in the process of being cancelled due to a poorly written headline, decides that he wants to investigate and report on the death of Wallace Sampson. His editor agrees, on the condition that he work with the older and more cynical Ronnie Bullock (Eric Roberts).

While investigating Wallace’s murder, Matt has to deal with his own very messy personal life. His fiancée, Delana (Anna Felix), wants to call off the wedding because Matt is too obsessed with work. His father (J.D. Souther) is dying of cancer but can still find the time to scold Matt for ending a sentence with a preposition. Finally, Matt is not happy about having work with Ronnie, who is an old school reporter who travels with a gun and who has little use for the demands of society. When Matt accuses Ronnie of being racist, Ronnie angrily corrects him. When Matt accuses Ronnie of being sexist, Ronnie just shrugs. It’s really the type of thing that only Eric Roberts could pull off.

Deadline is loosely based on a true story and it’s certainly a well-intentioned film. Unfortunately, the majority of the performances feel amateurish, the pace is rather slow, and the bad guys are so obviously evil that the film itself feels a bit cartoonish. (If only all murderers were as easy to pick out as they are in this film….) It suffers from the same problem that afflicts a lot of films about civil rights in the South, in that the black characters are often pushed to the background and left undeveloped while the film focuses on the nobility of rich white liberals. Again, the intentions are good but the execution leaves a bit to be desired.

That said, Eric Roberts is well-cast as Ronnie Bullock and, whenever he’s onscreen, he brings some much-needed energy to the film. In some ways, Ronnie is a cliché. He’s the cynical, politically incorrect journalist who, deep down, still believes in doing the right thing. But Roberts manages to bring some nuance to both the character and the film. The viewer will be happy every time that Roberts steps into a scene. Eric Roberts’s performance is the highlight of the film and the best reason to see Deadline.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Catching Up With The Films of 2022: Wrong Place (dir by Mike Burns)

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After his wife is killed in a car crash, former police chief Frank Richards (Bruce Willis) takes a job as a security guard for a small town convenience store. It’s not really a demanding job. As we see in one montage, Frank spends most of his time playing solitaire. However, one evening, Frank steps out back to have a cigar and he just happens to catch meth dealer Virgil Brown (Massi Furlan) executing a man. Frank promptly disarms and arrest Virgil.

Virgil’s son, Jake (Michael Sirow), is not happy about this. Knowing that Frank is the only eyewitness who can testify against Virgil at his trail, Jake heads off to kill Frank. However, when Jake arrives at Frank’s cabin, he discovers that it is inhabited by Frank’s daughter, Chloe (Ashley Greene), and her girlfriend, Tammy (Stacey Danger). Jake tries to take Chloe and Tammy hostage but Chloe turns out to be a lot tougher than he assumed. Chloe is waiting to hear whether or not she’s cancer-free and, as she explains to Jake, she has nothing to lose by risking her life and fighting him. And while Jake is certainly dangerous and quick to fire his gun, he’s also not the most competent criminal to ever come out of the backwoods of Alabama. If you’re guessing that this leads to several scenes of various characters chasing each other through the woods and shooting at each other, congratulations! You’re right!

This was one of the last films that Willis made before announcing his retirement last year. Watching the film, it’s easy to see that Willis was struggling a bit. There’s none of the swagger that viewers typically associate with Bruce Willis and he delivers many of his lines in a flat monotone. That said, this film is still a better showcase for Willis than American Siege or Fortress: Sniper’s Eye. Indeed, in the early scenes with his soon-to-be-deceased wife, Willis feels a bit like the Willis of old. Even if Bruce Willis was struggling to remember his lines, his eyes still revealed a lot of emotional depth. In the scenes where he and his wife discuss getting older and mention how scary it is to be sick, the dialogue carries an extra resonance. If nothing else, the role of a decent man who will do anything to protect his family seems like a more appropriate final role for Willis than the various crime bosses that he played in some of his other ’22 films.

Unfortunately, Wrong Place gets bogged down with the whole hostage subplot. There’s only so much time that you can spend watching people yell at each other before you lose interest. Ashley Greene, Stacey Danger, and Michael Sirow all give convincing performances but the film itself falls into a rut. When Jake is first introduced, he seems like he could be an interesting villain. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing but he’s determined to impress his father. (Sadly, it’s pretty obvious that Jake’s father will never be impressed with anything Jake does, regardless of what it may be.) Jake’s incompetence makes him even more dangerous because it also makes him impulsive and quick to anger. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do much with his character. Once the action kicks in, he just become another generic backwoods villain.

I get the feeling that the director meant for Wrong Place to be more than just another action film. The film moves at its own deliberate pace and, even after the hostage situation has concluded, the film still goes on for another ten minutes. One gets the feeling that the director wanted to make a sensitive film about the relationship between a headstrong daughter and her old-fashioned father. But, because this film was also a low-budget action film, he also had to toss in some backwoods meth dealers. The film has some moments of unexpected emotional honesty, many of them curtesy of Ashley Greene. But, in the end, it keeps getting bogged down with endless scenes of people running through the woods with guns. The end result is an uneven film but at least Willis gets to play a hero again.

Music Video of the Day: Let Her In, performed by John Travolta (1976, dir by ????)

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Did you know that John Travolta was singer, even before he starred in Grease?

I didn’t, until I came across the video below on YouTube. Apparently, Travolta released two albums before he played Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. (After Saturday Night Fever was a hit, a third compilation album was released. It was called — I kid you not — Travolta Fever.) As a singer, Travolta’s biggest, non-Grease hit was a 1976 cover of a song called Let Her In. The song spent five months on the U.S. charts and it peaked at number ten. It was an even bigger hit in Canada, where Travolta’s sensitive song stylings were appreciated by the most polite people to ever knock out each other’s teeth at a hockey game.

From 1976, here is John Travolta performing Let Her In.

Enjoy!

January Positivity: Seven Days Away (dir by Josiah David Warren)

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Clayton (Josiah David Warren) is the religious kid who everyone dreads getting in to a conversation with. He’s the type of kid who accepts a ride from one of his friends and then starts to give everyone a hard time for drinking and driving and….

Actually, wait a minute …. drinking and driving sucks!

So, Clayton is actually totally correct to tell his friends to put down the beer cans while they’re driving. They, of course, just laugh him off and call him “church boy.” One accident later, Clayton’s friend is dead and Clayton is more determined than ever to go down to Mexico and do missionary work. Everyone tells him that it’s dangerous to go down to Mexico. Everyone knows that Clayton’s father died while serving as a missionary. But Clayton and another group of friends still head down to Mexico.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Clayton’s other friends may not be drunk drivers but they’re still not all that interested in evangelizing in Mexico. They especially get angry when Clayton insists that they accompany him to the local church. Clayton finally gets annoyed with all of them and he decides to wander off on his own. Of course, that’s always a mistake. No sooner has Clayton turned down the wrong street than he’s been kidnapped.

Clayton finds himself tied up in an old barn and being held prisoner by a group of human traffickers. They’re convinced that Clayton is rich and they continually call his mother and demand that she send them some money. Meanwhile, Clayton soon realizes that he’s not the only person behind held prisoner in the barn. He also comes to realize that the desert surrounding the barn is full of dead bodies.

Noticing that his kidnappers are always drinking and smoking, Clayton tells them that they shouldn’t. When they demand to know why not, Clayton quotes Corinthians. That goes over about as well as you might expect.

Seven Days Away attempts to mix the faith-based genre with the action genre. When Clayton isn’t preaching or quoting the Bible, he’s running through the desert and trying not to get shot. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really work as an action film. The film uses some hand-held camerawork to try to generate some suspense but, at this point, the whole hand-held thing is such a cliché that it actually inspires more laughs than gasps of terror. The soundtrack is remarkably muddy and it’s often difficult to understand just what exactly anyone is saying. Even by the standards of the low-budget faith genre, the acting is amateurish. As a film, it just doesn’t come together. The fact that the film’s director also played the lead role was perhaps a bit of the problem. It’s hard not to feel the film would have had a better chance at success if he had just concentrated on doing one thing as opposed to everything.

I guess the best thing you can say about a film like this is that it was well-intentioned. Watching it brought back memories of the days leading up to Spring Break, when the campus would be full of stories about students who got drunk while partying in Mexico and subsequently vanished. I have to admit that I never had a lot of sympathy for the students in those stories. Sometimes, you just have to use a little common sense.

Book Review: Godzilla: The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters by Graham Skipper

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Do you like Godzilla?

You better! Seriously, for over 60 years, Godzilla has been the rightful king of the monsters and not even a few less-than-perfect films have been able to knock him off of his throne. He started out as a symbol of the nuclear age, a prehistoric monster brought back to life by man’s arrogance and war-like nature. He eventually became mankind’s protector but then deciding that he no longer cared for mankind. And then, like many international stars, he ended up making movies for the American studios. It’s an epic story and it’s hard not to like the big monster at the center of it. If, for some reason, you don’t like Godzilla, maybe Graham Skipper’s new book, Godzilla: The Official Guide To The King of the Monsters, will change your mind.

Godzilla: The Official Guide To The King of the Monsters is exactly what the title says. It’s a guide to all of Godzilla’s adventures, from his first appearance in the 50s all the way through his animated films and the current American version. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1998 version of Godzilla is only afforded a few paragraphs.) Helpfully, Skipper divides his overview into ears, so you can see how Godzilla changed as he moved from studio to studio. Skipper also takes a look at Godzilla’s existence outside of the movies, as a comic book mainstay and an occasional television guest star. The book is written with a lot of obvious affection for Godzilla in all of his incarnations and reading it will remind you of why Godzilla’s films — yes, even Son of Godzilla — are so much fun to begin with. Skipper includes a lot of trivia, some of which was new to even me. Such as, did you know that Luigi Cozzi re-edited and colorized the original 1954 Gojira for a 1970s release in Italy?

The book is also heavily-illustrated, featuring a lot of shots from the films and behind-the-scenes pictures of Godzilla and all of his colleagues. As I read the book, it occurred to me that, as goofy as Jet Jaguar was, it’s still nice that Godzilla had a friend. As well, as I looked at the pictures, it occurred to me that, even in the later films when Godzilla had been transformed from a truly fearsome symbol of the nuclear age to a somewhat goofy rubber monster, there was still an undeniable majesty to him as a creation. Even at his worse, Godzilla still looks like a king.

I picked up a copy of this book on the day after Christmas and I’m glad I did. Not only does it celebrate Godzilla but it also provides me with a guide because, over the next 12 months, I hope to watch every Godzilla film that’s ever been made. (I’ve seen the majority but, as this book reminded me, there’s still a few that I missed.) For the record, I still think that Godzilla vs Destoroyah is the best of the Godzilla films but who knows? Maybe my mind will have been changed by December.

Humanity has survived a lot over the past few years and I’m happy to say that Godzilla has survived with us. Graham Skipper’s Godzilla helps to explain why.

Retro Television Reviews: Making of a Male Model (dir by Irving J. Moore)

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1983’s Making of a Male Model! It can be viewed on YouTube!

While visiting the set of an outdoor shoot in Nevada, high-powered modeling agent Kay Dillon (Joan Collins) spots a ranch hand named Tyler Burnett (Jon-Erik Hexum). Tyler is tall, athletic, handsome, and polite. When Kay asks Tyler if he’s ever modeled, Tyler scoffs at the idea. Him? A model? He’d rather stay in Nevada and work on the ranch. However, when the girl he likes turns him down because he doesn’t have any money, Tyler reconsiders Kay’s offer.

Before you can say Midnight Cowboy, Tyler is walking around Times Square while dressed like a cowboy. At first, Tyler is resistant to Kay’s suggestions on how to improve his look. He doesn’t want anyone messing with her ear or trimming his eyebrows. But, after a humiliating meeting with a photographer who tells him that he just doesn’t have the right look, Tyler agrees to let Kay turn him into a male model. Not only does she fix his look but she also takes him to bed.

Soon, Tyler is one of the country’s most well-known faces. He branches out into commercials, using his sex appeal to sell products to the men who want be him. And yet, Tyler still feels lost. He’s not sure if Kay actually loves him or if she’s just using him. Meanwhile, his roommate, Chuck Lanyard (Jeff Conaway), is a former model who is now hooked on drugs and who constantly warns Tyler that all models are washed up by the time they hit 35. Tyler becomes disillusioned with his life as a model but is he capable of giving up the fame and the money and returning to Nevada? Or is he destined to follow in Chuck’s footsteps and head down a path of drugs and self-destruction?

Welcome to the world of decadence, 80s style! Making of a Male Model is one of those films where the synthesizer-heavy soundtrack plays through every scene and the only thing more dramatic than the line readings is the hair and the shoulder pads. It’s all a bit silly, none more so that when Tyler and Kay go to a costume party. Kay dressed up like Cleopatra. Tyler wears a cowboy hat. One random extra wears an oversized headpiece with two gigantic eyes painted at either end. It’s not so much Studio 54 as much as it’s Studio 54 as imagined by someone who has heard of the place but never visited. It’s decadent but it’s never quite authentic. The film captures the joy of not only looking good but also knowing that you look good but it never captures the tedium that can go into being on a shoot. It’s a film about the reality of modeling that never bothers to get that real but so what? You don’t watch a film called Making of a Male Model because you’re looking for reality.

Joan Collins appears to be having fun in the role of Kay. John-Erik Hexum, who was a real-life model, gives a rather stiff performance in the role of Tyler. He looks good but he struggles whenever he has to show any emotion beyond being slightly annoyed. If anyone really stands out in the cast, it’s Jeff Conaway. Conaway brings a bit of genuine sadness to his role but you’ll guess what’s going to happen to Chuck long before it actually does. Finally, Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the Congressman) plays one of Kay’s business rivals. He doesn’t get to do much but it’s always nice to see Kevin McCarthy playing yet another sophisticated but ruthless businessman.

In the end, the film doesn’t have anything surprising to say about the world of modeling and Tyler is never that interesting of a protagonist. However, there’s just enough 80s melodrama and 80s fashion to keep things watchable.

Catching Up With The Films of 2022: White Elephant (dir by Jesse V. Johnson)

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

White Elephant is not that bad. In fact, for a B-action movie it’s actually pretty good. If nothing else, it featured one of Michael Rooker’s best performances.

It’s important to start out this review by making that clear because I think a lot of people are going to be tempted to judge this film based solely on the fact that this was one of the last films that Bruce Willis made before his family announced that he would be retiring from acting due to health reasons. When the big story was published in the L.A. Times about Willis’s recent struggles and how those struggles led to him accepting countless roles in straight-to-video fare like American Siege, several people who worked on White Elephant were quoted, with many saying that Willis always did his best but that he was definitely not the Willis that they all remembered. The film’s director, action maestro Jesse V. Johnson, publicly stated that he would not make another film with Willis because “the arrangement felt wrong” and that Willis deserved a better end to his career.

And it must be said that Bruce is obviously not himself in White Elephant. As with many of his recent films, Bruce is cast as a villain in this piece. He’s a crime lord named Arnold and he spends the majority of his time taking meetings and giving order to his underlings. Eventually, he does pick up a gun and fire it but there’s very little of the cocky attitude and swaggering charisma that made Bruce Willis into a superstar. He still has the physical presence to play a tough guy. Bruce Willis still looks intimidating and the film uses him sparingly, never allowing us to spend too much time focusing on how different he seems from the Bruce Willis who starred in Die Hard and Pulp Fiction. One never gets the feeling that Bruce is being deliberately exploited in White Elephant, that alone sets it above some of the other recent films that have featured Willis. But, at the same time, Arnold is a fairly generic bad guy.

Fortunately, the majority of the film follows Michael Rooker in the role of a far more interesting criminal. Rooker plays Gabe Tancredi, a former Marine turned hitman. He’s about as ruthless as they come but he still has enough of a code of ethics that he realizes that he can’t kill a police officer named Vanessa (Olga Kurylenko), no matter how much Arnold wants her dead. Ordered to kill her, Gabe instead protects her, which leads to Arnold sending all of his men after them. It leads to several shootouts and explosions as Gabe puts his life at risk to finally do the right thing.

It’s a simple story but it’s told well. Jesse V. Johnson started out as a stuntman and he clearly knows his way around an action scene and the final shootout in genuinely exciting. The film is also helped by Michael Rooker, who brings a good deal of unexpected depth to the role of Gabe. Even though Rooker obviously knew that White Elephant was a B-movie, he still refuses to phone in a single minute of his performance and, instead, he turns Gabe into a surprisingly complex killer. Gabe’s relationships with his agent Glen (John Malkovich), his protegee Carlos (Vadhir Debrez), and Vanessa are all genuinely interesting. I especially liked the early scenes between Rooker and Debrez, in which the two actors wonderfully play off of each other and we get the feeling Carlos is almost like a son to Gabe. Of course, being genre savvy, we know that Carlos is eventually going to be assigned to take Gabe down but, because their friendship seemed so real, we find ourselves dreading that confrontation. White Elephant is a B-movie but, much like last year’s Corrective Measures and Gasoline Alley, it’s a B-movie with a heart.