The big picture
- Luke Hemsworth does his best but has nothing of substance to work with.
-
gunner
feels like a film where 90% of the work went into post-production. - The experience takes the action genre’s shootouts back to the PlayStation 2 era.
Filmmaker Dimitri Logothetis wasted talents like Nicholas Cage, Tony JaaAnd Frank Grillo about the astonishingly gloomy year 2020 Jiu-Jitsu — what hope was there that he would meet with a Luke Hemsworth Vehicle? gunner is a cheesy action film in the style of the 80s and 90s pulverizers, in which inept henchmen are thrown to the wolves of a macho hero who blows things up. Don’t be fooled by Morgan Freeman‘s supporting role — gunner is not at the level of the celebrated actor (Blink twice if you have been kidnapped, Mr. Freeman). The dialogue is even for Universal Soldier The sequel’s standards, performances are more wooden than Pinocchio, and the fight scenes are a jumble of digital effects that fail to elicit even a tingle of bloody and bruised excitement.
What is “Gunner” about?
Hemsworth plays decorated Afghanistan veteran Lee Gunner (lol), who has just returned to Clinton, where he takes care of his wife Clarie’s house (Julia Klass) Bar. Rowdy bikers and drug dealers hang out in the bar, doing deals or throwing knives at dartboards. Lee beats up some bad guys one night after they overstepped their boundarieswhich means retribution. While Lee is camping with his two sons, teenager Travis (Connor DeWolfe) and the smallest Luke (Grant Feely) and her uncle Jon (Barry Jay Minoff), the group stumbles upon a fentanyl smuggling operation. Uncle Jon dies, Lee’s children are kidnapped, and the only person who can stop them is… well, the guy named Lee Gunner.
Logothetis and co-author Gary Scott Thompson Write a boring screenplay that only uses genre cliches. gunner is one of those movies that you “have to drink if you’ve seen this before,” except if you follow that rule, you’ll have 30 glasses full before intermission. You can sample hits like “The Sacrificial Family Member,” “The Bullheaded Supervising Agent,” and “The Invincible Protagonist” as if there were a template to follow. The film is based on the skeleton of an already anemic shoot-’em-up corpse that has been eaten by vultures. Logothetis’ genre vocabulary is repetitive and unpolished, cobbled together from stereotypes that have been abused for decades.
gunner is an unsightly mess, no matter which cinematic aspect you analyze. Greenscreen backgrounds implement abysmal color grading and fail to fool anyone with fake driving scenes. Ammo streaks and muzzle flashes resemble Adobe After Effects aberrations that were hastily created because the artist’s subscription ran out. Then there are the absurd cuts to ridiculous skydiving scenes, remarkably unrealistic helicopters, and even character stunts replaced with Z-grade digital junk. Logothetis’ team had better be stumped with money and time, otherwise there’s no excuse for what reads like a rough draft on camera.
“Gunner” is an action film without any imagination
Perhaps adrenaline junkies with more action could overlook the gruesome development of the “story” – but that is not gunner. Except for an early bar fight where Lee beats up a couple of leather-clad thugs with a dartboard, there is nothing more imaginative than the mundanity of aiming and shooting. Where John Wick wields his blasters like a brush painting artistic brutality, Lee Gunner boasts the splendor of a shooting gallery dummy. Logothetis sets off a few fireballs when it goes bang, but even that resembles a child’s playset in comparison. Everything feels like a prototype never got beyond sketches in a notebook, but production went ahead anyway. Logothetis’ style is very agitated and incendiary, and to call it disappointing is a drastic understatement.
The thing is, Hemsworth is not even to blame – the eldest brother is handed material written on a napkin. Lee Gunner is a third-rate, burly soldier who waves his medals of honor and blinks his way through lines that would make Rambo blush in three movies. Mykel Shannon Jenkins plays this inexperienced daddy’s boy villain with this perhaps intentionally funny laugh that is so bad that every time Dobbs Ryker giggles, what little momentum there is is stopped. One gets the feeling that Logothetis is trying to inject humor into gunnerbut the film’s inauthenticity makes choices like Ryker’s laugh seem exceptionally out of place. The same can be said about Freeman’s use in small doses, as even he seems confused in his role by the film’s clumsy tone. Then again, perhaps Jenkins is just trying to find a hint of life, as the rest of the cast delivers his lines like lifeless zombies.
If you really dig deep, you might discover a positive quality in gunner — but it’s not worth the effort. Logothetis falls asleep at the wheel, resulting in sloppily edited gunfights with public domain tracks that seem out of place, as if God himself is playing a supporting role. The quality of the cinematography fluctuates depending on whether there is a location, the pace jumps like bumping into a record player, and the deference Logothetis tries to show to American soldiers in that final scene falls flat. Forget gunner hold a candle to Jack Reacher because this movie is desperately trying to be “watchable.” This combination of forgettable action nonsense has been seen before, and it’s been better almost every time.
REVIEW
Sagittarius (2024)
Gunner is a gross waste of resources on an action film that doesn’t even have competent filmmaking techniques, resulting in a horribly boring film full of digitized gunfights and soulless performances made for the bin.
- Morgan Freeman got paid (hopefully).
- Luke Hemsworth tries to salvage some fun as a vengeful father.
- Pick the criticisms you prefer. They are all valid.
- It is an action film without any great action spectacles.
- The whole thing scrapes the bottom of the barrel and brings the remains to you.
gunner is now available to stream on VOD in the US
Watch on VOD
