Take Cover has Adkins as a mercenary sniper who, after killing an innocent person, wants to retire. If only it were that simple, right? His boss (Alice Eve) is okay with that, as long as he does one more job for her. Again, if only it were that simple, right? And sure enough, when they get into the hotel suite he and his spotter (Jack Parr) are staying in before they do their job, they realize they're sitting ducks for a sniper who wants to get them! Now this beautiful hotel suite is a death trap, with it's large windows that have a fantastic view of the city providing very little cover from the assassin's bullets. As luck would have it though, two young women were sent up before the shooting to keep our heroes company, and while one dies off right away (Alba De Torrebruna), the other (Madalina Bellariu Ion) lives and proves to be quite helpful. Will Adkins make it out alive?
This is another one of your classic we have enough material for a 42-minute episode of a syndicated action series, but not enough for a 90-minute movie. Adkins does the best Adkins he can, be he doesn't get a lot of Adkins moments; and then Alice Eve as the evil mercenary leader is wasted in a kind of Eric Roberts sit-down role--the fact that she has to do a wardrobe change at the end seemed like a big ask for her part. I think the biggest fail for me though was how our heroes would do things that seemed strategic, but had no strategic effect. "Everyone turn all the lights off so he can't see inside here." Great, we'll do that... except the sniper has the same ability to see inside and shoot at them? Then why did we go through all the trouble to turn out all the lights? Our closest thing to an Adkins moment came when a clean-up crew went to the suite to finish everyone off, and Adkins took them out, but even that felt perfunctory, as if the people making the film were like "we need something to break-up the monotony of this siege." Finally, we get Chekhov's silk bedsheets, where this idea of using silk bedsheets to make an escape is brought up a few times in the film, and pays off in this silly sequence of Adkins parachuting out of the hotel suite using said silk bedsheets. It tonally felt off, and I wasn't sure how I was supposed to take it. All that said, if this were a 42-minute episode of an action series, where maybe Alice Eve's character had been developed over multiple episodes before that, we'd probably call it one of the best episodes of the series, and maybe that's wherein the rub lies: the idea of this script being in mostly one location was too enticing to pass up, so they made the movie, even if they were stretching to fill the rest of the time.
We've now done 31 Scott Adkins movies here on the site, and many of the ones before it are high-octane actioners directed by some of the best in the business like Jesse V. Johnson, Isaac Florentine, and James Nunn. That means he's set a high bar here, and not every movie he does will live up to that. I can also see why he would've done this project. Like if I read this as a short story while on a plane or a train or something, I'd have been into it, and I'm sure that's what intrigued him too as he read the script. The other thing in his favor is his presence elevates this beyond a total stinker. He's still fun to watch, and he plays these mercenary/special forces characters well--even when he's parachuting out of the building using silk bedsheets, aided by a not-well-disguised greenscreen. Maybe all these Adkins free streamers like this are telling me I need to get it over with and pony up the $5.99 and rent Diablo. And they're probably right, but I want to wait it out because I know eventually it'll make it to a streamer, so in the meantime you'll have to settle on reviews of movies like this.
This is our first time seeing Alice Eve on the site, and after how great she was as Typhoid Mary on the Iron Fist series, and how the cover of this makes it seem like an Adkins/Eve actioner, I was disappointed that she only had an Eric Roberts-esque sit-down role. I know out of the Netflix Defenders series Iron Fist is considered the weakest, but one of the bright spots for me was Eve's Typhoid Mary, especially after the sautéed in wrong sauce version in Elektra (through no fault of Natassia Malthe). Even the Iron Fist version was kind of sautéed in wrong sauce though, because it changed a lot of her backstory. In the comics, she's one of the top Daredevil antagonists, and one of the top female supervillains overall, so the fact that in the MCU she only has this short moment has been disappointing--though to be fair, we haven't gotten any more of Elodie Yung's Elektra after The Defenders mini-series either. Throw in Taskmaster, who, even though he was a male in the comics, would've been great if that version of the character was played by Olga Kurylenko--but instead they give her this weird version in Black Widow who gets an even rawer deal in Thunderbolts*--and between those three, Typhoid Mary, Elektra, and Taskmaster, you'd have a pretty sweet Disney+ series. It's one of those things where, as much as Kevin Feige and his MCU get things right, they do still miss from time to time, but the great thing about comic book content is you can always fix it. If they brought Olga Kurylenko back as the comic book version of Taskmaster and just said "yeah, that version of me that was injured in the building collapse was a plant, while the real me was learning all these skills," I'd totally be okay with it, especially if it's to team her with Alice Eve's Typhoid Mary and Elodie Yung's Elektra.
Is it me, or is DTV filmmaking becoming more cynical? I mean, I guess it's always been cynical on some levels, and this trend of doing films that take place in as few locations as possible isn't so much a trend as it is something that we've seen for a long time. Is Fred Olen Ray converting a grocery store into the inside of a space ship for a space romp film any different from this movie leveraging one location to save money? Something about Ray doing it though seemed more fun, didn't it? The other thing I think is we see this the most from the most cynical of DTV producers, Randall Emmett. Bank robbery stand-offs, sieges in underground bunkers, or cat and mouse chases through small wooded areas, culminating in the worst of them all, whatever Armor was. It's like when he's in his office with his collaborators coming up with script ideas, the first thing they do is find a way to set it in as few locations as possible. "Hey Randall, our location scout found this great mansion in the country in Georgia we can use." "Excellent! Find a CW drama alum, call up Bob De Niro's agent to see if he wants to shoot a couple scenes as a local sheriff, and we'll write some kind of home invasion-turned Die Hard rip off." "Chad Michael Murray's agent said he's free. Can he hold an assault rifle though?" "Who cares, by the time we get there, we'll have already generated enough streams to make our money back." Maybe this movie isn't as crass as that, but it's in the context of that crassness that I'm watching it, and every misstep it makes reinforces that crassness, even if it's not trying to be that. I guess like when the kid comes late to practice and everyone has to run laps, Randall Scandal ruined it for everyone.
Finally, who doesn't love a good Chekhov's something other than a gun? Will actually has a list of them on Letterboxd, which you can check out here. Part of Chekhov's Gun though is the payoff. As the audience, when we see the gun in the first act, we don't just want it to go off, we want a dramatic death, or even a dramatic almost death. It's interesting, because in my writing I try to keep the principal in mind, while also adhering to Ernest Hemingway's counter that inconsequential details can have value too. In my novel A Girl and a Gun, the main character Justin is friends with an NFL football player who's close to retiring. To drive home how much of a toll the NFL is taking on him, while the NFL player and Justin are talking, I have a league official show up at his hotel room to interrupt their conversation because the NFL player needs to take a drug test. For me, the inconvenience of the drug test itself was the plot point, but I discovered after that readers expected the results of the drug test to play a part later in the story. Chekhov's anything is so ingrained in us that without the payoff it can be confusing, or even disappointing. That gets us back here to this film, and Chekhov's silk bedsheets. I don't know what kind of payoff I expected with that, but the silly shot of him using the sheets as a parachute to escape the hotel room wasn't it. I think I thought maybe he'd do an old Batman show and climb down. The fact that the payoff wasn't good though brought the film back to that Randall Scandal crassness I talked about above, making something they thought was clever turn into a detriment.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can still stream this on Hulu, plus at one point it was on Tubi as well, so it may make it back there at some point. I think this is strictly for Adkins completists, or if you're struggling for more Snipetember picks. Also, if you haven't yet, check out the podcast episode Will and I did on this, 213 in the archives.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28129054
And if you're interested, you can purchase A Girl and a Gun over at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and Kindle unlimited. I always appreciate the support!
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