Precious Cargo (2016)

I recently had Sean Malloy from I Must Break This Podcast on our pod to chat about this film. The idea started when he showed me a Vulture article about the low-budget film world that Bruce Willis has been inhabiting, and how he's making these DTV flicks for a quick payday with barely any screen time. It was a great conversation, where we discussed Willis's career in more detail, and how it ended up here with films like this one. As always, if I haven't reviewed the movie we're discussing yet, I do it at some point down the road, so here we are.

Precious Cargo has Zack Morris sans large cellphone as a professional thief who's run afoul of crime boss Bruce Willis after his ex-girlfriend Claire Forlani stiffs Willis on a big score. To make it up to Willis and get Forlani out of the trouble she's in, Gosselaar agrees to gather a crew and carry out an armored car heist to pay Willis back. Problem is, as in all heists, things aren't what they seem, and it's up to Gosselaar to out not-what-they-seem Willis in order to get out of this situation with everyone safe and a lot richer.

And that's about it. This film is about as much painting by numbers as you can imagine. Our hero always has it figured out, except when he doesn't and the baddies get the drop on him. Our baddies always seem to have it all figured out, until they don't and Gosselaar and his crew get the drop on them. We know how this game is going to end too, with Willis holding the bag and Gosselaar and his friends escaping, millions of dollars richer. Then why are we watching it? Because it has Willis and Gosselaar on the tin. That's why they pay Willis as much as they pay him for one day of work in one location, and some scenes that are more his Fake Shemps (credit to Ty and Brett from Comeuppance for that one) standing in for him than actually him onscreen. The reason why Sean and I watched it is because we wanted to cover this current state of Willis's career, Precious Cargo was available for free on Tubi, and I liked the conversation starters of having Zack Morris in it as well; and now I'm reviewing it because, as I mentioned above, I always review the film we discussed on the pod to have it archived here on the site.

The Bruce Willis Paradox, as I titled the podcast episode, is that we have this fantastic 80s and 90s output from him, including some of the most iconic and game-changing films from that era; and now we have a different kind of game-changing taking place in the 2010s and 2020s with how he's helping form a new DTV paradigm. Sean made the point that he's shitting on his legacy, but as we think about it, is he though? In 2021 he had 9 Precious Cargoes come out, yet the talk all around the holidays was "is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" and "check out my John McClane Christmas ornament!" And the thing is, the movies are getting exactly what they want by putting Willis on the tin. Precious Cargo has 41 critic reviews on IMDb, and every time a new one of his Precious Cargoes comes out, tons of sites are excited to be one of the first to review them and let us know they did so on Twitter. The question I guess is, at what point do we reach a saturation point? At what point is it really shitting on his legacy? Right now it seems like that legacy still carries a lot of weight, a weight that a lot of people want to be attached to, so I guess we get 9 Precious Cargoes every year until the wave crests.

When Willis makes these quick and dirty DTV flicks, he's usually in as few scenes as possible in even fewer locations, while a younger actor does all the heavy lifting, and in this case that younger actor is Mark-Paul Gosselaar. It's a match made in heaven when you think about it. Willis and Gosselaar on the tin, someone browsing Tubi or another streaming service may see that and think "what has Mark-Paul Gosselaar been up to since Saved by the Bell? And then Bruce Willis is in this too? Yes, sign me up!" And then they watch it, wish they hadn't, and by that time, they've already seen myriad Tubi ads for whatever products are hawked on Tubi, and there's no way Tubi's giving anyone a temporal refund of their 90 minutes back--at least I can make lemonade out of lemons and get a podcast episode and a review post out of it. And the thing is, I don't think Mark-Paul Gosselaar is bad here, I just don't know what Mark-Paul Gosselaar being good here gets us. "Man, he really did a great job selling us on that third plot twist/double-cross we knew was coming!" Still, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Gosselaar because of Zack Morris, and I hope despite Mixed-ish getting cancelled that he'll get something else soon.

The man behind all of this is a producer named Randall Emmett, who has been pumping these bad boys out since the early 2000s. The formula is pretty simple, and if it's not Willis, it's Steven Seagal, or Robert DeNiro, etc. If we tagged Emmett, by my rough count, he's produced 22 movies that we've covered here. And it's not just cynical assembly line-style DTV fare either, he's produced big screen films like 2 Guns, and major Netflix originals like The Irishman. There's the article in Vulture on him that Sean sent me that was the impetus for reviewing this film for the podcast (which later our friend Will from Exploding Helicopter fortuitously sent me it again, because I'd lost track of it). It's an interesting read, especially for those curious about how the modern DTV sausage is made. The reality is, Emmett has found something that really works for him and the big screen stars of yesterday that star in his films, but is this a formula that works for us? I guess it does until it doesn't.

We couldn't finish this review without giving some shine to DTVC favorite Daniel Bernhardt. The one hope with more of these movies getting made assembly-line style by Randall Emmett's machine is that guys like Bernhardt get more work. Looking at his IMDb bio, he's getting a lot of smaller things in big budget productions, which is great too. Personally, what I'd like to see is some new Bloodsport sequels. Maybe another Dark Kumite run by Benjamin Franklin inside a prison. Bloodsport V: The Darker Kumite. Actually, Bruce Willis could play Ben Franklin. He's from the Philly area, it'd almost be like going back to his roots. Randall, baby, you gotta like what I'm bringin' here. Just give me the green light, and I can bang out 88 pages in no time. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is Bruce Willis's tenth film on the site, and while I don't think it'll be his last, I do think I won't be doing many more of these Willis-Emmett collaborations, so that number may stay at 10 for some time. If you're so inclined to check this out, it is available on Tubi. And the DTVC podcast episode on this that I did with Sean Malloy is available in the podcast archives, episode 88. Thanks again to Sean for coming on, it was a great time!; and if you haven't yet, you should check out his Dolph-themed podcast, I Must Break This Podcast.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4651410

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!