Bullet Proof has James Clayton (who also directed and co-wrote) as "The Thief," a guy who steals a lot of money from crime boss Vinnie Jones. Unfortunately in the process of stealing the getaway vehicle, he takes a car with Mia (Lina Lecompte), Jones's pregnant wife, in the trunk. She was trying to escape Jones, and the car he stole was the one one of his henchmen was going to smuggle her out in. This is an inconvenience The Thief just can't afford to take on, but when he realizes Jones is going to have her killed, we find he's also a sucker for a tough case, so he agrees to take her along. Now he's gotta run the gauntlet to get to his plane ride out of Dodge, as Jones is throwing everything he has at The Thief, including his specialist The Frenchman (Janvier Katabarwa). Will The Thief and Mia make it out alive?
First off, this doesn't have a lot of Vinnie Jones in it, but he's great as the head baddie. James Clayton, who neither Will nor I had seen in anything before, was a revelation to both of us as the hero. He also did a solid job directing, as this is a good, straight-ahead actioner. At 96 minutes it's maybe a little long, but we've seen worse; and I do think the fact that Lina Lecompte's Mia character was pregnant created complications that we may not have needed; but we have a lot of great action sequences, the hero's believable, and we want to see him and Mia survive and prevail over Jones and Katabarwa. It's all the things you look for in a good Saturday evening action film.
This is now 15 films for Vinnie Jones on the site, but beyond that I think it was great to give him his due in a full podcast episode. A role as the baddie is what we're used to seeing him do, and he hits it out of the park here, even in a limited role. What's great about his larger-than-life persona is he fills in the space in the many scenes where he's not on-screen, so he's still menacing the heroes and giving us something to root against. In the episode, Will went into Jones's football career with Wimbledon, how he was the face of this upstart team that was making waves in the Premiership. The EPL is different now, a Wimbledon can't muck up a 0-0 draw against one of the top four sides, but when Jones played it was a viable strategy to stay in the top flight, and he parlayed his role on that team to this career he's had which has been a lot of fun, and his performance here is indicative of that.
We often talk about the dreaded "vanity project," and one could make the case that that's what we have here, with James Clayton as director and co-writer, and then he cast himself as the hero. The thing that keeps it from being a vanity project though, is Clayton is really good as the hero. He's likeable and he's believable, which is all you want. Also, it looks like he brought on co-writers that helped keep the film lean and full of action, which was important. The film left the door open for a potential sequel, and whether it's that or another project, it'll be great to see what he has next.Who'd'a thunk we'd go into a Vinnie Jones movie coming out looking at a potential new DTV action lead.
As I mentioned above, the main complication in the plot was that the Mia character was pregnant. It really limits what you can do with her from an action and a damsel in distress standpoint. Who wants to see a pregnant woman jostling the baby around inside her in a car crash? Or dodging bullets? Or tied up by some baddies that want to claim the bounty Jones put on her head? There's a reason why the expectation is that you give up your seat on public transportation to a visibly pregnant woman--though you gotta be careful with that one and not make any assumptions--a human being carrying a tiny human being in their stomach is a big deal, and it's a bad look if you're making the poor lady stand and hold the rail on the subway while you're relaxing in a seat, let alone getting T-boned in a car accident or dodging explosions. I think Lina Lecompte played it well, and her character added a lot to the film that made us root for her and Clayton, but to be honest I still would've rooted for her based on all the other aspects of her character if she wasn't pregnant too.
Finally, the end of the film takes place in an abandoned airstrip, complete with parked planes and shells of broken down planes and helicopters. I asked Will, had one of these shells of a helicopter been blown up, would that have counted as an exploding helicopter in the movie? He turned it around on me and asked how I would feel about it if he included something like that as an exploding helicopter. To be fair, and it probably sounded like I was passing the buck back to him, but I feel like they're his rules to make. The volume of exploding helicopters in movies is something we all probably thought was large, but how large is something else. If you go to Will's Exploding Helicopter Letterboxd list, it currently sits at 825 films, and that number continues to grow as more people find ones and let him know. It's astounding how many movies have exploding helicopters in them, and while this film didn't blow one up, you can check out the Letterboxd list and see how many of the 825 you've seen. (If you're curious, I'm only at 205, a number that should probably be higher considering how many action films I watch.)
And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this on the Roku channel here in the States. For a DTV actioner from 2022, it's surprisingly solid, which is all you can ask for. As far as the episode, you can look for episode 146 in the archives, where we discuss this and The Big Ugly.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10198564
And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.
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