Sunday 4 October 2020

The Doorman review

THE DOORMAN (2020)
Director: Ryuhei Kitamura
Stars:Ruby Rose, Jean Reno, Rupert Evans,
Runtime:

And good grief, this is stupid stuff - just dumb, cliched and dumb - badly written, illogically plotted and with achingly awful dialogue. The family's stoner son shows a particularly disjointed collection of behaviours while his father spouts tone-deaf academic nonsense in the face of semi-automatic weaponary.

Diractor Kitamura is a B-movie genre hopper. His most recent was Downrange (2017) wherein people stranded at the side of the road after a tire blowout get picked off by a mysterious sniper, but he is best known for supernatural action flick Versus (2000) and horror entry The Midnight Meat Train (2008), perhaps mainly notable for Vinnie Jones' presence. He makes a perfectly good fist of The Doorman, either ignoring or unaware of the innate stupidity permeating every frame.

Variations on the plot have of course been done a thousand times over. But here we are light years away from recent state-of-the-art actions films with Denzel or Charlize or Keanu or other A-listers. This most resembles an old Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle. 

Since the genre is mostly male-dominated, does having a woman in the lead role make the film any more interesting? Actually, yes. Does it make the film any better? Not even for the briefest tiniest millisecond...

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