Main cast: Randy Couture (Jack Gibson), Louis Mandylor (Detective Cooper), Chris Maher (Sullivan), Texas Battle (Detective Owens), Benjamin Abiola (Alex), Michele Plaia (Veronica), and Cam Gigandet (Nick)
Director: Tibor Takács
Now, I’m sure we all have heard this story before. Ride-share driver Nick Gibson is forced to do bad things because he needs the money for his terminally ill daughter Emma’s treatments. He’s lost her mother, and now he doesn’t want to lose her too, but Emma is convinced that it’d be better if they would all just let her expire in peace.
No, he’s not giving up, which is why he assembled a heist team to steal a valuable cargo awaiting pick-up at the Vegas Valley Banks HQ. This gang includes Jack, played by main billing Randy Couture, and his ex Veronica that is currently sleeping with Jack because she owes him a lot of money and she can’t exactly tell him no when he wants to do the naughty with her. As you can imagine, Jack and Nick are going to be rivals in this thing.
Indeed, Nick is soon betrayed by Jack and his gang. He’s left for dead but too bad, he’s still got some breath in him and now it’s Blowback time…
Now, after the set-up that leads to Nick’s betrayal, this movie is roughly divided into three different story lines. One, Nick plots to get back at Jack’s people. Two, Jack’s team starts to turn on one another. Finally, Detectives Cooper and Owens lead a team in trying to figure out who is behind the heist and what the object that is stolen really is.
This is a short movie, below one hour and thirty minutes, but that’s okay, as the movie never wears out its welcome and knows when to end. In fact, the actual meat of the story takes up shorter of the screen time, as the whole subplot with the two detectives figuring out things can be easily removed from the movie and it will still be the same. That’s right, the cops play zero impact on the overall plot, and I can only wonder if those scenes had been added solely to pad up the running time.
Now, I only watch this thing because of Cam Gigandet. I know, I know, but there’s just something about him that makes for a nice B-grade action movie lead. Sure, he’s not the best actor around, but he can get physical when he has to, and he embodies the cheese of the genre while still being good enough an actor to elevate the material he is given.
Indeed, this is arguably his movie, as he gets the most screen time of the cast here, and yet, it’s cute that Nick isn’t a typical super capable action hero. He needs help quite a bit here, and the true scary-capable sociopath here is Pete, the henchman of the gangster that owns the stolen item that teams up with Nick to clean up the mess. These two actually have some pretty unexpected and fun chemistry together, and a part of me will always wish that this movie had focused more on these two and less on the other less interesting or even extraneous subplots here.
Believe it or not, Mr Gigandet is the best actor here, if only by default because the rest of the cast have little to do. Even Randy Couture has surprisingly little screen time for someone with a main billing, and he spends his scenes mostly growling and issuing threats and not much else. On the other hand, Mr Gigandet gets to crack some one-liners now and then, show some comedic timing, plays the sad noble dad forced to do bad things for his daughter, and also demonstrates his character’s more sociopath side when he has no qualms enjoying how Pete tortures their victims.
If there is one glaring problem here, it’s that the movie isn’t particularly exciting. There aren’t much violence, as the focus is more on people snarling into phones or striking gangster poses when it’s not on cops trying to investigate things and going nowhere most of the time.
When the denouement comes to be, it just sort of happens, and then the movie ends after that and yes, that’s it, basically. The whole thing feels very linear and basic.
Still, it says a lot of Mr Gigandet’s career that this is actually one of the better films of his that I’d seen in a while, heh. He’s hot, the show is not, but if being boring is the biggest sin of the show, I’d live.
