Vanquish (2021)

They’re Really Fruits, You Know…

Earlier this year I became a certified film critic on Rotten Tomatoes. Along with the benefits came a strange bit of unpleasantness that I’m sure 99.99% of other critics on the site don’t care about. I’ve never liked the idea of giving a movie “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, rating it “fresh” or “rotten”, or assigning an arbitrary number of stars. Per RT etiquette, I’m now expected to rate the films I review—which hadn’t been that big of a deal, until today.

As you may have gathered from its 6% Tomatometer score, George Gallo’s Vanquish is not a good movie. Repetitive, weirdly edited, and way too stagnant in the action department to warrant the pedigrees of its leads, the latest Lionsgate release is yet another reminder that the studio who once stood high on the shoulders of American Psycho and Saw is now mostly an ATM for the likes of Bruce Willis.

Even though I’m going to give the film a negative review (Spoiler!), it’s times like these when I wish there were a third category—maybe “overripe”. This might prompt readers scrolling through the myriad write-ups to stop and actually look past the negativity (or stop hate-reading the negativity).

Oftentimes nuance is just as key as context.

Here’s why Vanquish is, for me, actually a soft recommend.

The film stars Morgan Freeman as Damon, a retired corrupt police officer who had once been something of a hero cop (according to the headlines, at least). After having been paralyzed on a case, he now spends time idling about his incredible oceanside compound, tended to by his assistant, Victoria (Ruby Rose).

One night, Damon offers Victoria a job, using skills she’d buried in a traumatic past: he needs her to pick up several duffel bags full of cash from various unsavory characters around the city—a task for which she will be handsomely paid. She refuses. But before she can outright quit, Damon arranges for Victoria’s young daughter to be kidnapped.

The adventure begins.

Much as you might expect from Rose’s former role as TV’s Batwoman, Victoria’s night is full of encounters with colorful characters. At each stop in her mission, she battles crews ranging from gangbangers to crooked cops to flamboyant, coked-up trust-funders. There’s gunplay, fisticuffs, and a lot of riding around on the supercool motorcycle Damon has provided her (perhaps a cosmic nod to Freeman’s Lucius Fox character from elsewhere in the Bat-iverse).

We’ve seen this all before, executed in a much slicker fashion, which makes the discount-John Wick exercise that much harder to connect with. From the embarrassing six-minute opening credits montage that (kinda) tells Damon’s story via the cheapest Word Press-looking newspaper headlines (all from “The Daily News”); to Victoria’s constant recollections of events that happened literally five minutes earlier; to night shots that look like they were color-timed with an “antifreeze” filter; to the script’s tired video game level structure in which the cut scenes are cut-and-paste returns to Damon’s house to drop off bags, Vanquish plays like a proof-of-concept animatic that was accidentally released to the public.

Told you it was gonna get a lousy rating.

But the lousiness is only half the story. Nestled among the junk are a few bright spots that tease a movie very much worth watching—or at least taking more seriously than most reviews suggest.

Let’s start with Ruby Rose. Yes, she’s much more charismatic in the much better movie The Doorman, and I understand that one of the big criticisms of her in this film is her total lack of affect. But her flatness didn’t bother me. Victoria is a character whose entire world is turned upside down within a matter of minutes, and she’s forced to resurrect deadly skills from a life she’d deliberately locked away.

She’s almost going through an hours-long out-of-body experience; you can see her wishing she was anywhere else, holding her daughter tight. It’s possible that expression could be attributed to Rose herself, wanting to get the shoot over with. In this case, though, it’s perfectly safe to err on the side of “right for the character”.

This detached demeanor also serves the film well in a scene where Victoria gets jacked up on a large amount of cocaine. It’s a positively bonkers sequence that made me pine for a Crank sequel/spinoff/reboot with Rose stepping in for Jason Statham.

(For the record, Morgan Freeman looks like he’s legitimately half-awake. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Gallo and his crew broke into the elderly actor’s house at 3am to shoot some scenes, and convinced him he’d believe the whole thing was a dream the next morning.)

The next gem in Vanquish’s warped crown is Patrick Muldoon. If you only know him as the guy who broke up Zack and Kelly on Saved By the Bell, this performance will be a revelation. As the crooked fed conspiring with a gaggle of lowlife cops against Damon, he imbues the part with reptilian cool. He’s like the smarter, darker little brother of Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction, complete with that floppy wisp of a ponytail.

Finally, I’ve got to give Gallo credit for imbuing his pseudo-shoot-’em-up with a remarkable twist—which, in good conscience, I can’t give away. Others may have spoiled the outcome of Victoria’s night from hell, and I invite you to look for spoilers elsewhere (if the thought of sitting through Vanquish is just too much to bear). I will say that the resolution is odd but lovely, and I would welcome another filmmaker stealing this twist and incorporating it into much stronger material.

I’m dancing around a turn of events so surprising (to me) that it redeems Vanquish as a concept, and almost as a movie; just not enough to rate it as “fresh”, which makes me feel kind of rotten.

Check out my interview with writer/director George Gallo on the Kicking the Seat YouTube channel!