Reprisal Review is a 2018 crime/thriller about a bank manager haunted by a violent heist that took the life of a coworker who teams up with his ex-cop neighbor to bring down the assailant.
Right from the opening moments of Brian A. Miller‘s new thriller Reprisal, there’s a distinct detachment, a kind of plasticine artificiality to it that completely wrecks any hope of investment by the viewer. It has its intentions in the right place, and certainly draws from a huge cache of far better films in the genre, yet can’t for a single moment make it convincing.
Jacob Tasker (Frank Grillo) is husband to Christina (Olivia Culpo), the two raising Sophia, their young diabetic daughter (Natalia Sophie Butler) and trying to make ends meet with debt slowly wearing them down. Jacob is the manager of a bank that one day gets violently robbed by a well-armed, masked assailant named Gabriel (Johnathon Schaech), leaving one man dead and Jacob traumatized. While police can’t seem to connect any dots, Jacob calls upon his neighbor, retired cop James (Bruce Willis) to track the robber down, leading him into a deadly showdown that pushes Jacob to his absolute limits when Gabriel toys with him, pulling his family into the game.
All that is of course familiar to anyone who has watched even a few crime thrillers in the past few decades. This is textbook stuff and the filmmakers seem driven only to satisfy the barest of minimum, blandly checking off a short list of must-haves, even if a few ideas might have had some larger potential. Unfortunately, as the movie simply slogs from point A to point B without much reason other than to pass through a number of oft-visited action movie landmarks – including shootouts and chases – there’s nothing of interest to keep us wanting more.
These characters are only superficially developed, with Jacob perhaps the most attended to, though everything about him is soaked in tropes. He at least seems committed to the part, even if he’s tethered to startling low grade dialogue and action. Willis is barely in the movie, reading his lines with the energy of a toll booth operator, with every plot turn spun in generic platitudes. It’s almost amusing how genuinely lifeless this is, even with all the bloated, over-the-top gunfire.
This could have been a much more compelling drama, with the two leads (Grillo and Schaech) given something more to do than play in this shallow sandbox, perhaps making this a more effective psychological thriller than it is. With it’s hammering, derivative score and paint-by-numbers set-pieces, this is nothing but cheaply made filler hardly worth a look. For die-hard (unavoidable) Willis fans only feeling it compulsory to see everything he’s done.