GUNS UP REVIEW
“Requires a lot more patience than even the most diehard of action buffs might be willing to give it.”
As someone who watches a lot of movies, it’s still surprising how many crime-driven action thrillers are being produced on a regular basis, ranging from larger studio movies to tiny independents. Guns Up is from Millennium Films, who has produced movies that range from larger studio movies (like The Mechanic and The Expendables movies) to VOD schlock. This is probably more in the vein of the latter, following a similar path as other Millenium movies that feature name actors taking a paycheck to appear in lower-budget films expecting to make money overseas. At least that’s what one must presume when Melissa Leo shows up in this particular Millennium production.
Written and directed by Australian filmmaker Edward Drake (Apex), Guns Up puts Kevin James back in a less comedic role as retired ex-cop Ray Hayes, who is married to wife Alice (Christina Ricci) with two kids, an 18-year-old daughter (Keana Marie) and younger son (Leo Easton Kelly). Ray and Alice want to buy a diner, in order to give their kids a better life, so he turns to Leo’s character to get some work as her paid henchman. Ray starts doing jobs for her, often with instructions from Luis Guzmán’s Iggy, but along the way, he ends up in trouble with the city’s major mob boss, Lonny Castigan (Timothy V. Murphy), which could put his family in grave danger.
I enjoy seeing James in this type of role, but the machinations of the various crime factions are not so easy to immediately figure out, and it doesn’t help the movie’s case that the main bad guy is just awful, due to the horrid performance by Murphy, who seems to be experimenting with accents. That alone regularly detracts from the movie working, even with the plot device involving his son Antonio (Maximillian Osinski) to set Castigan against Ray, which seems a little too obvious.
James isn’t bad in this type of role, even if there isn’t a lot about Ray that makes him a particularly compelling character, and the scenes with his younger son are rough to get through. The movie certainly gets quite a bit better once Ricci gets more involved in the action, and it’s also great to see Luis Guzmán in a key movie role like this one. Leo basically has two scenes and then is gone, which is probably the biggest bummer about what would have been a much better movie if her role was more significant. But that’s four actors trying to do their best to make up for one of the worst movie villain performances ever put on screen, and that is saying something, considering that Kraven the Hunter was just last year.
Movies like these only work if the stakes are high and the villains are credible, and Guns Up drops the ball on the latter aspect of the dangers Ray has to face. Essentially, the problem with making a movie in such a storied genre as this one is that there’s very little room for surprises, although Drake does manage to throw in a couple twists that help set up the last act of his movie. Considering that both James and Ricci have backgrounds in comedy, it’s also surprising how humorless much of the movie is, at least until the last act where Drake lightens things up a bit.
Having just watched the far superior, Nobody 2, it’s disappointing how Guns Up fails to keep the viewer invested with fairly standard action and poor character work. James and Ricci (and Leo) do their best to improve on an action movie that doesn’t offer anything particularly new or exciting for an already overused genre. Because of that, Guns Up isn’t awful, but it requires a lot more patience than even the most diehard of action buffs might be willing to give it.
Rating: 5.5/10
Guns Up is now available via VOD.