Mafia Wars has Gigandet as Italian mafia enforcer Griff, who's known for being brutal, and also has designs on moving up. His brother's (Sterling Griffin) in prison, and his prison mate is Terry (Tom Welling), who just happens to save Griff's brother's life. Now with Welling out, the brother tells him to look Griff up if he wants a job. Not so fast cowboy, turns out Terry getting out of the clink was a plan by local detective Lombardi (Chris Mullinax), and he wants Terry to use his in with Griff to get close so they can get evidence against him and bring him down. Terry doesn't have much choice, so he does as he's told, and lucky enough a local sex worker (Cher Cosenza) happens to also be a CIA agent, so at least he has some help when things go sideways.
This wasn't half-bad. Welling was good in the lead, Gigandet was bad enough as the baddie, and Cosenza was good as a supporting character with a twist. I don't know where that gets you though. Do I have to know? I guess if I'm writing the review I do. In his review on Bulletproof, Chris mentioned how in the 90s PM would've made this, and I think that's a great jumping off point. Mid-90s, directed by Joseph Merhi, action-directed by Spiro Razatos or Cole S. McKay, starring Gary Daniels or Don "The Dragon" Wilson, with a baddie played by someone like Evan Lurie, it could've been an instant classic--or it could've been written and directed by Joey Travolta and starring John Aprea and Michael Nouri and ultimately been kind of a dud, but the point is, that high ceiling was there. Outside of a few big names in the DTV action world doing next-level stuff, this might be as good as it gets, so maybe we just need to take stuff like this that ain't half-bad and run when we do get it, because the DTV floor now is much lower too.
This is our first time seeing Cam Gigandet on the site, despite this being his third (and later this month fourth) film we've covered on the podcast, all of those being in the two-movie new DTV episodes we do each month with Ty. I don't know how the idea of the "Phillippe Phactory" came to be, I think Ty and I were talking about how Gigandet, Kellen Lutz, and maybe a Chad Michael Murray all filled niches usually filled by Ryan Phillippe. It's interesting though with this movie, because I don't know you could've just plugged Phillippe into Gigandet's part and have it work better, I think Gigandet is a fully flesh-out Gigandet here, doing the best he can to elevate this part. His IMDb bio has a bunch of stuff in various stages of development that could be interesting, so I imagine this won't be the last time we see him on the site, but at the very least, we'll see him more on the podcast.
This is also our first Tom Welling film, which I'm a little less surprised about, because he's only beginning his DTV journey, while Gigandet's been swimming in that pond for the last ten years or so. And with Dean Cain turning out to be a jerk off, I guess we needed a new former TV Superman to have a go in DTV films--the movie even leans into it a bit with a joke about the "fortress of solitude." The thing is, Tom Welling is no longer the Tom Welling we know from Smallville, he's become former NFL offensive lineman and current NFL TV analyst Mark Schlereth. I think that may suck more for Schlereth than it does for Welling, because Schlereth wanted to start an acting career, and now Welling will take any parts Schlereth could've gotten. The thing that hasn't changed for Welling though is he's still a likeable lead, which really helps in a movie like this that doesn't have a lot going for it, if you can at least root for the hero, that's half the battle. I don't know how many DTV duds we've gotten lately with bearded actors playing former special forces guys in flannel shirts and worn baseball caps that do nothing for us, to have Welling show up and not be that is a breath of fresh air--even if he's rocking an early-2000s goatee.
The main impetus behind Welling's character getting arrested is he goes abroad to sell drugs to make money for his niece's operation back in the States. This device has been used in so many DTV movies, it makes me wonder if a bunch of DTV production companies and distributors have joined the private health insurance lobby to keep America from having single payer health care. For some reason as a society many Americans don't look at that and say "that's pretty shitty that a country this prosperous would rather health insurance execs and shareholders get money from people being sick or dying, instead of keeping its citizens well," or even dumber, "it's pretty stupid a lot of Americans would rather pay out the nose for health care than be called a communist." In my case I'm lucky enough to have health insurance from my job, but even then if, God forbid, I was diagnosed with something serious, or got hit by a car, the things that my private health insurance wouldn't cover would bankrupt me, and unfortunately I don't have a relative who can go abroad to sell drugs or maybe get involved in one last heist to pay off those medical debts. But hey, at least DTV movie screenwriters can use it as a plot device, so there's that.
Finally, speaking of Chris the Brain, I had him on the pod recently for an upcoming episode, and he mentioned the pronunciation of Cam Gigandet's last name. I thought Gigandet was more committed to the French pronunciation of his name than I was mine because his family had more recently come here from France than mine had from Quebec, but that doesn't appear to be the case. With that in mind, I don't know why my family decided to anglicize "Poirier" so it sounds like "poor-EE-er" instead of "poir-EE-ay"--and it may not have even been their decision, because another common pronunciation is "poor-EE-ay," splitting the difference between the French and the English. For example my UMaine Black Bears hockey team has a freshman scoring sensation named Justin Poirier, and announcer Jeff Mannix always pronounces it "poor-EE-ay." Maybe I'm just not as a big a stickler on it as Gigandet is his. "Poir-EE-ay," "poor-EE-er," or "poor-EE-ay" is all fine for me, hell if you just get close I'm happy enough, but if someone ever asks me, I always default to "poor-EE-er."
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi. It's not a horrible deal, and if you're a big Welling fan from Smallville, or a Gigandet fan from Twilight, it's worth giving it a shot. And if you haven't yet, you can also check out the podcast episode where Ty and I discussed it, number 224 in the archives.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10450852
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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