The Getback (2023)

This is one that was on my radar just for the Theo Rossi factor. I've been a big fan of his since seeing him in the Luke Cage Netflix series. As Ty from Comeuppance and I were looking at more movies to do podcasts on, I felt like this would be a natural one, because it not only had him, but Kim Coates, whom we're both a fan of, and Dermot Mulroney, who had a great showing in Section 8. That episode was released back in October, number 135 in the archives.

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

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Vendetta (2022)

Back in October I had failed to secure a guest for an upcoming podcast, so I decided to fire up a few Bruce Willis DTV flicks on streaming sites and discuss them on a solo episode. Of the myriad options available to me, this one piqued my interest because it has one of my favorite actors, Theo Rossi, plus the idea of Thomas Jane and Mike Tyson in addition to Rossi and Willis had to be good too. But then there was that grimacing bearded white guy on the cover. That couldn't mean anything bad, could it?

Vendetta is about said bearded, grimacing white guy (Clive Standen), former special forces (aren't they always) with a beautiful wife and daughter (aren't they always) whose world comes crashing down when a gang member kills said daughter. Standen gets revenge on him in classic grimacing bearded white guy style, which draws the ire of the gang member's brother, Theo Rossi, and dad, Bruce Willis. So then they kill the wife, but don't bother finishing off Standen, who then recovers, and seeks revenge, with help from a pipe-smoking Thomas Jane. Will his revenge be worth it? And how much of a role will Mike Tyson have?

 
This thing was just a mess from the word go, which means I don't know where to start. The story was long for 96 minutes, which is saying a lot, because 96 minutes usually feels compact. Theo Rossi was great, which introduced a heavy Destro Effect, because Standen's hero was so one-note and uncompelling we just had to gravitate toward Rossi. Even in Rossi's death at the end, he's almost laughing at the movie, like "my death serves to show how pedestrian and one-note this film is." There's this part at the end where Rossi and his gang are chasing Standen and Jane, and Jane calls Mike Tyson, who runs a chop shop. Tyson's like "yeah, lure them here, we'll take them down," and he gets his gang together to confront Rossi's gang. I thought "okay, it's on then!" But it wasn't, Rossi just went in and shot them all. The Willis of course is scant, but he and Rossi are great as father and son, so much so that I wasn't upset that we only got so much Willis. I think with the cast, if it hadn't been so relentlessly paint-by-numbers, and had a hero who was more fun and engaging, it might have worked; but unfortunately it had none of that.

We last did a Willis film back in January, so almost a year ago, and that one was Precious Cargo, which was also following up a podcast episode. At that time, we didn't know he was squeezing as many of these movies as possible in because he would have to retire due to his aphasia. At that time too I'd decided to take a moratorium on reviewing them, because they were taking on this cynical, assembly line quality, especially the Emmett-Furla-Oasis ones. I think there still is that cynicism in how this one was made, but seeing Willis as a gangster again was fun--more fun than the crime boss he was in Precious Cargo I think. This is now 11 Willis films on the site, but with the podcast episode this was on, plus one I released with Ty from Comeuppance a month later, and one we have coming next month, I now have a lot of Willis in the can. I don't know if I'll get to it all over the next year, or if it's even worth giving all six of those other films reviews. I feel like there are guys out there like Fred Williamson, Cirio H. Santiago, or Robert Ginty who need more love than that, so I guess we'll see--I guess we'll always have them in the can in case I come across a week where I didn't get anything watched.

As I mentioned above, I'm a big fan of Theo Rossi. In particular, I loved him as Hernan "Shades" Alvarez in the Netflix Luke Cage series. He brings an indie actor sensibility to something like this, a feeling of like "what is he doing here?" but I think the opportunity to act opposite Bruce Willis had to be big--plus whatever paycheck for a short shooting schedule--and he really makes the most out of these scenes they had together. The problem is, when you have a baddie of the quality of Rossi, and you pair him with Willis, you need a hero that matches that, and they didn't do that here with the standard one-note grimacing bearded white guy. It felt like someone bought a great tequila, and wasted it in a margarita. The good tequila is for sipping straight, and the good baddies are for the exciting, compelling heroes, like a Dolph or a Scott Adkins.

The bearded, grimacing white guy is pretty standard--or "Standen?"--for these Willis films. If it's not a Clive Standen, then it's Jessie Metcalf, Patrick Muldoon, Chad Michael Murray--or in Fortress: Sniper's Eye, it's Metcalf and Murray. Hell, even Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who started off as an off-beat bearded white guy, couldn't escape the grimacing, brooding aspect all these guys end up being. The question is, who asked for this? Is this what people consider an "Alpha Male," like maybe the Emmett-Furla folks just gathered up a bunch of silly tweets about "Alpha Males" and Frankensteined this thing: white, bearded, trucker hat, flannel shirt, former special forces, drinks beer, has a beautiful wife and maybe a kid and a nice granite kitchen island in a McMansion, and then some Theo Rossi/Bruce Willis baddie comes along and threatens it, so they need to get extra grimace-y and defend their turf. It's so much a parody of itself that it's clownish, especially the preponderance of them in these assembly line Willis films, but here it took the silliness to another level with how one-note and uninspired Standen's character was, which made the Destro Effect with Rossi and Willis that much worse. The thing is, this movie's story sans the grimacing bearded white guy was done perfectly in Recoil with Gary Daniels, so they had the blueprint, and just didn't follow it.

Finally, to end on a good note, Thomas Jane was really good in this, and we're seeing him amass something of his own solid DTV career. This is only his fourth film on the site though, one of which was another Willis flick, Vice. One thing that would be interesting, especially now that Disney+ has been losing money with the original content TV shows, is if their studios came up with a DTV wing for all of their Marvel properties, and maybe these DTV flicks could be like the old one-shot comic books, like a one-off story where maybe a different artist and writer takes an established property on a different adventure. So maybe we get one more look at Thomas Jane as the Punisher, but he has nothing to do with the Jon Bernthal version and his place in the MCU, and maybe they give an Isaac Florentine or a Jesse V. Johnson the chance to direct it. With the work Jane's been doing in these DTV flicks, it would be great to see, and I think it would be a nice antidote to the fatigue people have been experiencing with the expansive interconnectedness of the MCU.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Unlike my inspired idea for a Thomas Jane Punisher DTV flick, this wasn't so much. Cool to see Willis and Rossi act opposite each other, but the story was too all over the place and the hero was too one-note. If you want to check it out though, it's still on Hulu.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14849038

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