Alan Ritchson is always good for an Alan Ritchson type
Playing into that one character you always play might not be the way to blaze a path to an Oscar, but it does seem to be a good strategy for earning a regular paycheck.
Take, for example, Alan Ritchson, traveling butt-kicker Reacher in the Prime Video series Reacher. In addition to playing a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in that series (which ends its fourth season this week; a fifth season is expected, according to Wikipedia), Ritchson plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in Runner, released in theaters last week, less than two months after the release of Motor City, another movie where he plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys.
Hank (Ritchson), who has a “big guy” name, as Owen Wilson’s Ben says, is a courier, running things both legal and legal-status-unknown around Brisbane, Australia, where he lives and works on his sobriety. He is charged with picking up a medical package at the airport, which is where he meets Ben, who explains that he, Ben, is part of the medical package. The item is a secured cooler keeping a liver viable for a sad little girl who needs a new liver and Ben is the guy who knows how to keep it at the right temperature and knows the code to open it.
Things immediately start to go wrong with this assignment as Hank realizes that he and the aggressively chatty Ben are being followed by two SUVs full of bad guys. Soon the shooting and car chasing and occasionally some punching and kicking get underway as Hank and Ben try to race the organ to an out-of-town hospital before it loses viability while a cartel boss’s desperate, sweaty son (Rodrigo Santoro) attempts to hijack it for his mother’s own use.
Just to really hammer home that all of the violence Hank and Ben participate in is For A Good Cause, we see the sick kid and her mother regularly and we spend a little too much screentime on Hank’s sad backstory with his own sad sick daughter. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the movie really underlines the Extreme Danger and Extreme Heroism by scoring a lot of the action with music that feels like it was maybe left over from some Angel Studios’ biblical epic’s battlefield scenes. (Angel, which I know largely for its Christian and Christian-adjacent films, is this movie’s distributor and apparently has also started to release some less overtly faith-based movies. TBD on what all that means.)
Not unlike other movies I talk about here, Runner piles on a lot of unnecessary story elements for its characters — Santoro’s character has a difficult relationship with his mother! Hank is still sad about his failed marriage! These little extras aren’t needed because this movie’s core — overly talkative regular-guy Ben and strong silent type Hank — is very charming. They have good “guys who become buddies doing a task” chemistry, their respective skills help give energy and the right amount of humor to the action scenes. When the movie just gets out of their way, turns down the score and lets them do their things — Ritchson’s Reacher variant, Wilson’s Owen Wilson variant — we in the audience get the fun popcorn time the trailer promises.
In July theatrical release Motor City (available for rent or purchase), Ritchson, playing Vietnam vet and lunch-box-toting factory worker John Miller, is less crackling but still fun to watch. This action-revenge movie of few words lets 1970s production design, costuming and songs do most of the talking. Moments after Miller proposes to girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley), cops are blasting smoke bombs into their home. Sophia and Miller end up under arrest, with police pulling bricks of cocaine out of his car, the car that hours earlier was briefly stolen from him. As we see in flashbacks, before she was with Miller, Sophia was the girlfriend of drug muckety muck Reynolds (Ben Foster) and now Reynolds, with the help of dirty cop Savick (Pablo Schreiber), is getting Miller out of the way. Miller goes to jail and Reynolds goes to Sophia, re-endearing himself to the woman who felt so betrayed by Miller. When she discovers Reynolds’ treachery and he gets violent, Miller’s friends (played by Lionel Boyce and Amar Chadha-Patel) break Miller out of prison to rescue Sophia.
Motor City is aggressive about its stylishness, from its slo-mo-enhanced action choreographed to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” to every choice made with Woodley’s hair. It is very self-consciously Doing A Thing, which I found entertaining mostly and kind of endearing even when it felt like it tipped into A Little Much territory (which for me was when “Nights in White Satin” appeared on the soundtrack). For me, this movie boiled down to the appeal of Alan Ritchson and how he dances through his fight scenes with balletic precision, taking just enough punches so we don’t think he’s a robot.
Ritchson, of course, isn’t the only actor playing his standard character and serving up action in recent releases.
Ryan Reynolds plays that one Ryan Reynolds character who is here a fighter pilot during the Top Gun-era Cold War in Mayday, an Apple TV movie. Troy (Reynolds) is tasked with operating the camera on a spy mission over Soviet territory. When his plane is shot down, he winds up behind enemy lines and is found by Nikolai (Kenneth Branagh), an American-culture-loving former KGB agent who insists on Troy calling him “Nik” and is delighted to have real-life Maverick in his house. When Troy nixes Nik’s suggestion that they just wait out the end of the Cold War safely in Nik’s cabin, the two have to work together to get Troy to safety without Nik being arrested for being a traitor. Chasing them down is Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski), a glasnost-hating KGB agent hoping to use this situation to return the U.S.S.R. to its former hardline glory.
That all of these characters seem more naive than they should be for who they are is probably my biggest beef with this otherwise good-natured, goofy caper-like movie. There is some silliness to the “Russians are people, just like us!” elements of Troy’s journey. But Branagh’s heft helps to cut Reynolds’ patter-based glibness and the result is a highly watchable light bit of comedy.
Also playing his one character is Jason Statham in Mutiny, an August release that showed up last week on VOD for rent or purchase. Statham is Cole Reed, a former British military guy and also former British cop who is now the bodyguard for a shipping magnate Tibu (Ramon Tikaram), who treats Cole like family and buys him a fancy watch and is the stand-in for Cole’s cop father, who died during a police raid or something and Cole feels responsible and this is way too much backstory for a movie that was trying to sell itself by boasting it had the same director as Plane. Plane got right to the Plane of it all. Mutiny takes too long to get us in an actual ship on the actual water. The action kicks off on dry land when Tibu, who is about to sell his company, is ambushed. Cole nearly gets him to safety but Tibu is shot and has just enough time to say “take care of my crappy adult son” (not an exact quote) before dying. Cole then seeks the men who killed his beloved employer, which leads him to sneaking onto a cargo ship. Also on the ship is Angie (Annabelle Wallis), the third mate, who has her own irrelevant backstory. These are the good guys on the ship; everybody else (captain played by Roland Møller plus a bunch of henchmen I couldn’t keep straight) is a bad guy. What Cole and Angie, separately at first and then together, discover is that the ship is part of a human trafficking operation and some of the refugees aboard this particular ship are in dire need of medical attention. To get the help they need, Cole and Angie will need to kick, punch, shoot and stab their way through the bad guys.
There is one particularly fun scene of balletic hand-to-hand combat featuring Statham near the movie’s end. It stood out to me for how much more interesting it was than most of the action that preceded it. Statham does a lot of his Statham thing but the movie doesn’t have the fun this kind of action-focused affair should have. We are watching Mutiny for Mutiny, and all that implies in terms of sassy one-liners and creative violence, not a rumination on father-son relationships and not a study of the different ways human traffickers can be bad. A movie like this can put its characters in scary settings with bad people, and those characters should take it seriously, but the movie where a guy fights another guy with a giant hook shouldn’t take itself so seriously or weigh itself down.
I feel like recent Amazon Prime Video release The Runner also had action-entertainment potential, but it just doesn’t work, I think this is in part because the movie has no faith in itself or in lead Gal Gadot. In a movie that feels like smooshed together bits of other movies, Gadot plays Maia, a London prosecutor and single mom to diabetic kid Noah (Rory Wilmot). She drops her son off at school and then goes on a run before a big day in court where she’s meant to question the one witness who can put away the criminal on trial. Early in her run, she gets a call on Noah’s phone from a man (Damian Lewis) saying he has Noah and needs her to do exactly what he says if she wants to see her son alive again. Naturally, the task is killing the witness and she has about an hour to run a needlessly far distance to his hotel (no Uber in London?) and get the job done before Noah dies of the diabetic coma Damian Lewis (called simply “The Caller” on IMDb) has put him in.
Most of the action is Maia running through the city while talking to Damian. Along the way she tries to figure out how to tell someone what’s happening. This story feels like a copy of a copy of some similar movie that would have starred, for example, Jason Statham, but the movie never figures out a clear lane to stick to — is Damian Lewis a creepy sadist who gets his kicks from this or a professional just doing a task? Is Maia just a regular-lady mom trying to save her son or does she have some weird violent past? Or is Gal Gadot just so unsuited for this part, however well she might physically sell the action elements, that the movie doesn’t know how to compose her character? I vote for that option. One of the many signs of the movie’s total lack of faith in Gadot is the strange close-ups, shaky cams, slo-mos and other camera effects applied to Gadot, particularly in scenes where you might need an actor to convey an emotion. You get the sense that either Gadot couldn’t portray, like, panic or rage, or the moviemakers decided to add the character’s emotions in post. Either way, it highlights the overall limpness of her performance and adds to the “cheap story told cheaply” feel of the whole endeavor.
Featured photo: Motor City.
