10 Minutes Gone is a crime thriller that centers on a man whose memory has been lost due to a bank heist gone wrong, needing to piece together who sabotaged him.
Frank Sullivan (Michael Chiklis) is the best lock man in the business, that business being bank robbery. Him and his brother Joe (Tyler Jon Olson) are part of a group of elites hired by a crime boss named Rex (Bruce Willis) for a major score, where some big money is at play behind the scenes. There’s also a mysterious box that lies at the center of the heist, one that goes, of course, all wrong, leading to a shootout on the street where Frank and Joe end up in an alley, he getting knocked out and Joe killed. More troubling is the ten minutes of memory Frank has lost (not to mention the box). Believing he’s been set up, he teams up with Joe’s bartender girlfriend Claire (Meadow Williams) to try and piece it together, while Rex goes on the hunt from his nest atop a skyscraper.
Movies are changing, that’s clear if you’re any kind of fan, the low budget thriller with a famous name in the credits becoming a new staple; cheaply produced, easily distributed, and modestly consumed. That’s fast money. As you already know, names like Eric Roberts, Nicolas Cage and Willis are already part of the shift, these actors and others finding the steady paychecks better income than the few major film roles that are surely not as plentiful in the years beyond their prime.
So it is with director Brian A. Miller‘s latest entry, a by-the-numbers potboiler that has few numbers and no boil. It’s mostly unwatchable, poorly acted, poorly directed, overly-scored, and so transparent, it’s practically invisible. I’ll give Chiklis a proper nod, he putting the most effort in this amid a cast that does little to support him. He at least gives some umph to the generic, deeply chichéd dialogue, delivered like a first table reading by everyone else. What’s troubling about all that is that, at this point, we now expect that from Willis, who is obviously far more capable but clearly on set for less than a day in doing his bit for this, leaving his few minutes on screen lumpy to say the least.
There is potential in the minor screenplay by Kelvin Mao and Jeff Jingle with some betrayals and twists, but it’s so wound up in unintentionally laughable exchanges between these thugs that it never has good footing to get any stability. Overblown is one word that could fit the bill here. Ridiculous is probably better. The problem is that it appears the filmmakers think this works, trying to take seriously a string of hopelessly tropey setpieces and pass it off as innovative. It isn’t.
Still, there are fans of this and I’m wagering that the studios know that base is growing, mostly because we’re starving for entertainment and the quality choices are narrowing. One might hope that something like this might prove fun simply for being bad, but that’s not the case. 10 Minutes Gone is 90 minutes lost.