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‘Marauders’ (Film / VOD) reviewed…

Marauders

In ‘Marauders’, released in the US this week, Bruce Willis, Chris Meloni and Dave Bautista star in an ambitious revenge thriller that never quite lives up to its potential…


“You know the parable of the Good Samaritan? Well, this one’s angry…”

A series of robberies – undertaken with both precise planning but also a degree of precise violence – seem to be leaving the investigating FBI department, led by Montgonery (Christopher Meloni), baffled. In each case the robbery takes place with a team of masked, but well-trained assailants and though they are armed, most witnesses are left unscathed. However at each scene at least one person ends up dead, deliberately and seemingly needlessly murdered.

But it soon becomes clear there’s a raft of conflicting agendas at work.Senior bank honcho Hubert (Bruce Willis) clearly has his own reasons for believing there’s more to the attacks on his empire. There are apparent links to a rogue military unit believed responsible for killing of his younger brother and his platoon years before and some of the missing money shows up in a shady police-officer’s own pockets. Montgomery, his right-hand man Stockwell (Dave Bautista) and new-recruit by-the-book Wells (Entourage‘s Adrian Grenier) must navigate a complex web of loyalties if they’re to make sense of what’s really going on.

 

Marauders castThe problem with Marauders is that despite some decent talent involved and lofty aspirations (including a sometimes interesting but uneven script – over-burdened by not-as-profound-as-they-think quips and one-liners) the stylistic touches and flourishes are distractingly just that. Whether it’s a tinted lens, a drone shot, a pull-focus scene, a slow-motion walk or neon-illuminated rain, the elements feel like a bullet-list of arbitrary ‘to-do’ shots and the inevitable result is a film trying to look impressive rather than actually being so. Steven C Miller’s Marauders wants to be Michael Mann’s HEAT but it wears all such influences on its blood-stained sleeve – almost as if the young film-maker (who got his break working with Willis on the 2015 release Extraction, another below-the-radar outing for the once reliable Die Harder) had seen the Pacino / De Niro epic and wanted to emulate everything that was good about it… instead only producing a homage where the joins can be seen (sometimes, literally – an early bullet-wound is quite clearly a badly-disguised squib , a leg blown off is glaringly artificial, despite quick cuts and someone receiving a bullet through the throat still manages to speak). The solemn, familiar faces bring their gravitas to the set but too often edge from dramatic into the outright pretentious. Equally the budget frequently swings from quite lovely set-pieces to blatantly cheaper shots, as if some was filmed after the budget started to run out.

MaraudersThe trailer misleadingly shows Willis – being the biggest ‘name’ involved – as the star but he is essentially just a supporting, lynchpin role. He grimaces and sighs through little more than ten minutes of screen-time but is wholly miscast (or, possibly, just not really trying), there for the pay-cheque and ultimately running only the short range of emotions those multiple Os require. On the other hand, Meloni, best known for Law & Order, is clearly having the time of his life. His FBI boss role may be a familiar template, but he delivers snarky comments like bullets, many of which find their target, even if they get repetitive. Dave Bautista’s dialogue is sparse, snarky and more exposition-friendly but he arguably makes as much of it as anyone else in the cast. They all feel like they are converging on the crime-scene from different movies but do their best.

Marauders shows that while Steven C Miller may be getting a break he deserves, there’s still far too much here that he needs to learn and tighten… the resulting film is basically a case of over-reach with far too many diversions and cliche short-cuts to hold it all together… and with an ending – giving no specific spoilers – that betrays a more lazy, B-Movie mentality. It’s all a testosterone outing, with every single female role reduced to pointless sexist dialogue or tragic back-stories, all there to spectacularly fail the Bechdel Test.

That aside, for the most part Marauders isn’t anywhere near as mind-numbingly awful as some have claimed – there are moments where it’s far superior to many a cops-and-robbers outings… it’s just so frustrating to think what the various ingredients that probably looked good on paper could have done if mixed more effectively and with a surer-hand on screen.

7/10

Released by Lionsgate Premiere (in cinemas and On-Demand) now. It will receive a Blu-ray/DVD release in September. No UK date announced.  

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