The Getback has Rossi as a former police detective turned bounty hunter. His boss, Kim Coates, sends him to get a young hustler (Shane Paul McGhie) who's supposed to testify in the trial of a major crime boss (Naughty By Nature's Treach). Once he secures the bounty, things go wrong. People are trying to kill him, and he doesn't know whom he can trust. Who are the good guys here? Who are the baddies? And what does his former boss, police chief Dermot Mulroney, have to do with everything? Eventually he realizes it's up to him and his bounty to work together if the two are going to survive and get out of this alive.
This is really good, I think anchored by Rossi's performance, and the supporting cast. We also get a streamlined, well-paced story, which is important in these kinds of films where we don't have all the facts right away, and the narrative reveals things as it unfolds. A movie like that can get bogged down easily, or leave too much for the end where we end up needing to put on eye protection with all the loose ends flying together. There's almost a bit of the 90s indie crime flick here, from that pre- to slightly post-Pulp Fiction period where distributors were gobbling up as many of these kinds of films as they could get to cash in on the Pulp Fiction success, but they weren't Pulp Fiction rip-offs or heavily influenced by it yet. Not as gritty or dark as a Bad Lieutenant, but something my friends and I would've discovered around the same time and really enjoyed. With that in mind, especially if you can get this free on Tubi, it's worth checking out.
This is our second Theo Rossi film, the other being the Bruce Willis flick Vendetta. Unlike that one, which had Rossi as a great baddie juxtaposed with Clive Stanton as a one-note, grimacing, bearded white guy hero, this one puts Rossi in the lead and leans on him, which was a great move. He starts the film trying to talk his way into an underground poker game, which makes us think he's some kind of down-on-his-luck hustler character, but once he gets inside and announces he's a bounty hunter and starts shooting up the place, we get the full sense of him as a take-charge kind of hero. What's great about Rossi, is he could be equally believable in either role, he's that talented an actor, and that versatility gives a lot of depth to his performances. I was looking through his IMDb bio, and he has a few others that I could do here, so I may make them happen in the future. Either way, I'm always a fan of his stuff, and this one was another great performance.
We last saw the great Kim Coates back in 2019 when I did Goon, not long after I came back from that unplanned 4+ year hiatus. There he was playing a hockey coach, while here he was the shifty, don't-know-if-you-can-trust-him owner of the bounty hunter firm Rossi works at. It seems like whatever he's doing, whenever there's Kim Coates, there's always fun, and while this is a smaller role here, he definitely is fun, and that helps underpin his interactions with Rossi. This is only his 10th film on the site, and even though we last saw him 4 years ago, his last appearance before that was 2013, so this is only twice in ten years. I think part of that comes from the amount of roles he does that don't overlap with the kinds of things we do here at the DTVC, but like Rossi, I do see some others on his IMDb bio that look good for us, so we should see him more in the future.
And then we have Dermot Mulroney. This is now his third time on the site, after also being on the podcast three times already too, the other two being the Dolph flick Section 8, where he has a dark Grecian Formula mustache over a gray beard, and then The Courier, which was covered with Will from the Exploding Helicopter when he was on the pod to talk about Olga Kurylenko. He just had another new movie come out, Ruthless, directed by Art Camacho, which makes 9 feature films and two TV series in 2023. That's verging on Eric Roberts territory, and maybe he's headed in that direction. As this movie shows, the more Dermot Mulroney the better, so I'm all in favor of him pumping out as much stuff as possible. He was great here as the police chief who may or may not be corrupt, may or may not want to give Rossi a hand, may or may not want to help him get back on the force. We kind of know where it's going, because it's the only place it can go, but with someone like Mulroney, we enjoy the ride.
Finally, this film is a Tubi original, which, one would think, would mean this would always be up on Tubi, which it is now, but when I did the podcast episode with Ty back in October, that wasn't so certain, as it was listed as coming down within the week. I was so worried I grabbed the images right away--which came in handy when I was short on time this week and needed a movie, this one was ready to go. Eventually they put it back up, but what does that mean? Why would a Tubi original come down from Tubi? I know the response from the people who push physical media out there, but the thing is, one, I don't think this is available on DVD, and two, we rent a two-bedroom apartment, I don't have room for tons of DVDs, so something like this needs to be streamed, and I take for granted that if Tubi is the distributor that they'll always keep it up. We're seeing this in other places. Disney+ takes stuff down, like Spectacular Spider-man, though at least with that, you can buy it on Amazon. I looked at the IMDb page for this, and I'll be the 7th critic review, so in 100 years when people are looking for something to watch, they may stumble upon the IMDb page, see my review, and think "I'd like to watch this," only by then it'll have disappeared, though maybe someone will have a copy on a physical harddrive that'll be discovered, the way a copy of The Passion of Joan of Arc was found in the estate of an Italian priest who used to screen it for mental health patients.
And with that, let's wrap this up. At least right now you can get this on Tubi here in the States, and it looks like you can rent it on Amazon too. This is a fun 90 minutes that does its job, something you can't exactly say for every movie nowadays. And if you haven't yet, you can check out episode 135 of the podcast where Ty and I covered this and the Tony Schiena film The Weapon.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26570494
And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.
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