Jennifer Garner comes back with a vengeance to her Alias action roots kicking, but not screaming. She goes stealth as one tough cookie in a film that should have been better. It goes way too over the top with brutal bloody violence. The body count ramps up to the point of ridiculousness.
Taken Director, Pierre Morel, takes overkill to a ludicrous level and confuses the premise with a timeline that doesn’t make much sense. There’s more action than dialogue and lines like “If we don’t get ahead of this, it’s going to get really bad,” don’t work.
Garner first comes on the screen as Riley North, in full battle mode foreshadowing what’s coming even before the credits. Morel switches to her coming out of a coma after seeing her husband, Chris (Jeff Hephner) and daughter, Carly (Cailey Fleming) gunned down by stereotypical drug cartel henchmen at a carnival on her daughter’s birthday. Morel adds flash frames to show the disturbing action under the colorful backdrop of the ferris wheel. But it all seems incomplete.
LAPD Detective Carmichael (John Gallagher, Jr. – Newsroom) pulls her out of the hospital to take her to pick the shooters out of a lineup. She does, but they’re set free after a rigged trial. She sets out for revenge.
Five years pass when she’s ready to get justice her own way. But Morel doesn’t show enough about those 5 years where she went from mild mannered Mom to savvy bad ass who knows how to track down her prey. She’s wreaking havoc on anyone who has any kind of connection to the murders, but staying under the radar gathering info while picking off the leaders of the drug cartel, crooked cops and FBI agents.
But how did she get to be this skilled at killing? Morel leaves that to a blurred and fleeting combo of short scenes that come way too late in the film. It shows Riley fighting, training and taking a beating to toughen up to take her ultimate revenge. The audience is left to fill in too many blanks. There seem to be a few scenes missing, including coming in on the middle of the disturbing scene leading up to and including exacting justice on the judge who dismissed her case. There’s just no set up.
To her credit, Garner, although slightly built and thinner than ever, trained hard to carry out the action sequences. She uses all kinds of weapons, including the impressive guns on her muscle bound arms. She’s supposed to look like some kind of superhero, always able to bounce back after getting totally beat down by a never ending parade of bad guys twice her size.
Just watching Garner in this movie is exhausting. She works hard, but the the emotional pull isn’t there. It’s not for lack of effort. As Riley, she takes justice into her own hands because of what they did to her daughter, but you don’t get a sense from the script that she cared as much about her husband.
One of the best scenes is where Riley gets to take revenge on snooty mother of one of her daughter’s classmates who was mean to Riley and Carly 5 years earlier. The way she toys with her is almost funny and one time you really root for her wielding justice.
This is not a great movie, but it does put Garner back to her roots, in the lead as an action star. The message of a corrupt justice system stays well under the radar. This film is one brutal scene after another. Garner is worth a better vehicle than this. It’s pretty predictable. Riley might be indestructable, but this movie is DOA.
Styx Films 102 minutes. R. Reviewed September 6, 2018
