Larceny is another R. Ellis Frazier crime yarn that takes place in Mexico, only this time, instead of Gary Daniels or Luke Goss, he's got our main man Dolph in the lead. Dolph and his crew have a heist planned: rob one of the biggest drug dealers in Mexico, whose money is being kept in a vault in a prison. So Dolph gets himself arrested, his crew sneak in, and then they grab the cash and try to break back out. Problem is, as always, things aren't what they seem. Can the Dolph-inator pull this one off? And how many R. Ellis Frazier mainstays will we see before he does?
This wasn't horrible. The thing that ultimately was its undoing though was, yet again, it only had about 43 minutes of story that it stretched into 90. I feel like I'm saying this every week, "this movie would have been a great episode of a syndicated action show." The thing is here, not much happens in the middle, and when not much is happening, it feels like padding for the sake of a 90-minute runtime. Also, on the IMDb we have a "(rewrite)" credit, and as we know, whenever a script gets a rewrite, we tend to get uneveness and issues with the pacing. Dolph is still Dolph though, and he's in enough scenes that he can carry the film to some extent; and I also liked Jocelyn Osorio as a part of Dolph's crew/love interest, though for some reason she has a shoehorned-in damsel in distress routine at the end of the film that made no sense except as a byproduct of a rewrite. I think ultimately this ends up as another one of these Dolph 2010s DTV flicks that's not as bad as some, but not as good as others.
This is our 61st Dolph flick on the week that he turned 64. I don't know that anyone on the DTVC has as many films as their age. Gary Daniels turned 58 this year, so he's close at 52 films. Right now we have four Dolph DTV films left to review--one of which though is Sharknado 5, and when I reviewed Sharknado 3 in 2020, it ended up with the fewest views of any review I've posted since I've come back from hiatus, so I think we'll leave that for last, as people seem to be Sharknadoed out--plus he has some new ones coming out soon, so 65 by 65 is almost a foregone conclusion as long as I'm still making posts. There was a part of me in watching this that felt like this could have been one of his late 90s/early 2000s films, which isn't necessarily a good thing, but it had a bit of that feel to it. The problem is, a lot of those movies had a really fun quality to them that this lacked, and I think a big part of that was the middle where not much was happening. Dolph can usually prop that kind of thing up by just being Dolph, but sometimes it's even too much for him.
We've seen our share of R. Ellis Frazier films here, whether he's writing, directing, producing, or all three. Most of his movies are made in Mexico, they have a stable of core actors that he always uses, then stars sprinkled in like Dolph or Daniels, and smaller supporting roles for other stars like Corbin Bernsen or Louis Mandylor. There's a sense with these supporting roles that it's whoever has time between films that can make it down there. There's an earnestness to the whole process that I appreciate, as that's kind of the DTV spirit we look for; but I wish the stories themselves had a little more to them. They feel like your standard 2010s DTV storylines that we see in countless Tubi offerings: pulling off a heist but something goes wrong; guy stuck in Mexico and doesn't know what to do to get out of a bad situation; white guy in Mexico trying to piece together a crime and seemingly gets nowhere until he doesn't. He has another film with Gary Daniels coming, Repeater, plus I still need to review a previous Daniels collaboration, Misfire, so this won't be the last we see of Frazier. Maybe he needs to get a tag on soon...
Speaking of getting tags, we're up to 7 on Louis Mandylor, of which this
is the fourth since we've been back from hiatus. I think a big part of
it is he works with Jesse V. Johnson, and we can't not review his
movies. According to IMDb, this isn't the last time he worked with
Frazier either. What I like about him doing all these films is, sometimes he has small Eric Roberts-esque
roles, like in this movie, but others he plays a main baddie or hero,
like in the Debt Collector movies or Mercenary. It'll be
interesting to see how many more of his films we get here on the site,
but if he keeps working at this clip, I imagine quite a few.
One thing I haven't explored on here yet, is how this film falls for what I'm terming the "Prison Film Trap." I've been seeing it more and more, especially lately. The Prison Film Trap is the idea that a prison is a great place to set a film, but when you get into making it, it turns out not so much. That's because, in one location like that, it's hard to have continuous action. It starts to become repetitive, which ultimately felled this film here. A prison is a perfect place to set a video game, as you can really play with that space to have things happen. In a movie, the novelty wears off soon, and you're left with a sense of "we get it, let's get on with it." Riot is another recent example where it went wrong. Avengement worked, but it worked because it mitigated the prison aspect by having a lot of action outside the prison mixed in. I wonder if all these filmmakers watched Death Warrant and thought, "that looks easy!" I was trying to think of another prison movie that I liked, and the only one I could think of was Bloodfist IV, which had Ben Franklin running a Dark Kumite. I guess that's the recipe for success then.
And with that, let's wrap this up. This wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. I went on IMDb to see where you can find it now that Netflix dumped it, and I can't find it anywhere here in the States, not even on DVD. Netflix was the original distributor for the US, which may explain it, but also is scary to think they can cut a film and, because they had the distribution rights, that's it, no one else gets it. Hopefully it'll get back out there, maybe on Tubi, but it's also a bit unnerving that a movie from 2017 with Dolph in it has just disappeared, at least here in the US--according to IMDb it did get DVD releases in most other places, though Australia looks like they're in the same boat we're in. Netflix just seems more insidious by the day. Maybe I need to watch the remaining movies in my queue and finally cut my subscription...
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4797160
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