Review: 'Vanquish' puts Ruby Rose on a motorcycle, Morgan Freeman in a wheelchair, and the audience in a coma
It’s hard to fathom how many things can go wrong in a movie as thoroughly and consistently as they go wrong in “Vanquish,” an organized crime thriller curiously devoid of thrills.
Morgan Freeman has top billing, playing Damon, a retired police commissioner who’s paralyzed and in a wheelchair in his expansive waterfront mansion. The only person he trusts is his caretaker, Victoria (Ruby Rose), a single mom who frets over getting medical care for her daughter, Lily (Juju Journey Brener).
On this night, though, Victoria learns that Damon, despite his hero-cop reputation, is the godfather of the city’s crooked cops — who are feeling an FBI agent, Monroe (Patrick Muldoon), breathing down their necks. Damon asks Victoria to run a series of errands, “five stops, five pickups,” to collect money from Damon’s various criminal enterprises. When Victoria refuses, Damon forces her into it by holding Lily hostage.
What the audience soon learns is that Victoria is no ordinary caretaker. She’s got a dark past of con games, double crosses and murder. And at each of the five stops, she’s going to encounter people from her past life, and some old scores are going to be settled.
The premise is OK; heck, Jackie Chan has worked magic with less. But director George Gallo, who wrote the classic buddy-chase “Midnight Run” and directed the atrocious Nicolas Cage vehicle “Trapped in Paradise,” seems singularly incapable of staging an action sequence.
Gallo’s idea of a street chase involves Rose (or her stunt double) whirring along on her motorcycle in front of cars moving a good 20 mph. Gallo doesn’t even try to mount a decent hand-to-hand fight, something at which Rose was fairly adept during her one season as Batwoman. The only time she springs to action is when Victoria is drugged, and then lands in a “Scarface”-sized pile of cocaine — which produces the same effect as a can of spinach to Popeye.
Without any action sequences, Gallo relies on Rose’s acting and charisma, which turns out to be a severe miscalculation. Meanwhile, Freeman looks like he signed on for maybe two days’ work — and spends almost all of it i one room, sitting in a motorized wheelchair.
At a brief 94 minutes, “Vanquish” feels padded to the gills. Maybe it’s the six-minute credit sequence, that uses newspaper headlines and too much percussion to lay out Damon’s unnecessarily elaborate backstory. Or maybe it’s how every time Victoria jumps on her bike to her next pickup, she has flashbacks to things we saw three minutes earlier. Either way, Gallo’s ineptitude is on glaring display, in a movie that will soon fulfill its destiny as one of those titles you skip past on Netflix on the way to something else.
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‘Vanquish’
★
Opens Friday, April 16, in select theaters; on digital VOD starting Tuesday, April 20. Rated R for bloody violence, language, some sexual material and drug use. Running time: 94 minutes.