Trauma Center is a 2019 thriller about an injured young woman who must escape a pair of vicious killers while trapped in a hospital.
Madison Taylor (Nicky Whelan) has moved to Puerto Rico, struggling as a waiter in a small restaurant while serving as the guardian for her sixteen-year-old sister Emily (Catherine Davis). Meanwhile, local detective Steve Wakes (Bruce Willis) is neck deep in a setup that sees his operation go from bad to worse when Madison, while walking home, gets caught in a shootout between thugs and the police. She’s shot in the leg and taken to the hospital, where Emily was earlier admitted for her asthma. Now, the very bullet in her body is evidence to who shot her, and when the bad guys come hunting, the medical center goes under lock down and it’s up to Wakes to keep Madison alive.
That all sounds like a clever set up, the gun the killer used on record in police ballistics, the only breadcrumb leading back to him the bullet lodged in Madison’s thigh. What that could lead to is an interesting forensics investigation, but what director Matt Eskandari and writer Paul Da Silva are more after is boilerplate action. Even that wouldn’t be so bad a choice, but what Trauma Center offers instead is nothing of the sort, the film a lackadaisical romp through a series of see-through plot points and by the books storytelling.
It would be one thing to say the reason to show up for this thriller is for Willis, but his track record of late has somewhat lessened that anticipation. He’s taken, like many of his generation, to doing smaller, cheaply made films churned out like product rather than quality entertainment. He’s barely engaged in this, many takes most likely the first, with little effort to hone the character he’s playing, which amounts to two levels of acting, one yelling and the other, well, erratic. It’s truly hard to figure what he’s going after.
Still, he’s hardly to blame, the film itself hopelessly generic, even with the outfitting to become much more. Whelen does good work trying to prop up what she can of the girl in distress with a few tricks of her own, making her genuinely fun to watch and seems to try harder than just about anyone else on set. Maybe that’s not fair, but this is a movie with no sharp edges, almost blissfully free of tension or authenticity. Very little of it makes much sense, but that’s not the point, and shouldn’t get in the way of some decent brain-free action, but the lethargic pacing, wooden performances, and uninspired momentum keep this well below what it could.
Movies are changing, and as more and more big names in the business make the shift to smaller studio, conveyor-belt moviemaking, this is the state of middle-level, digital streaming cinema. Trauma Center isn’t the worst by far, and for growing fans of this watered down genre, is what it intends. Enjoy, if you can.