Now Morgan Freeman has joined the list of formerly respectable actors who have succumbed to the lure of easy money via straight-to-streaming B movies. There’s a potentially interesting element to “The Ritual Killer” in which an African medicine man is linked to murders on both sides of the Atlantic. But there are confusing time-sequence lapses and a worldwide manhunt becomes a myopic procedural. Why? The story bogs down with boozy Mississippi detective Cole Hauser, his personal baggage subplot and the amateurish and/or clunky performances by pretty much everyone other than Freeman, who plays an African studies professor with a past.
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The whole time I’m watching “Vanquish” (2021), I thinking to myself, “isn’t Vanquish some kind of cold medicine or something?” Afterwards, Google confirmed it’s a medicine, but for headaches, which would be ironic if the film had made my head hurt. However, I pretty much could tell an action film with plausibility problems starring a crappy model/boxer/actress (Ruby Rose) as an elite hitwoman/courier/double-crosser with a sick kid doing the bidding of a phoning-it-in (literally!) cop/gangster/paraplegic (Morgan Freeman) with a guilt complex was going to suck, so it made me more sleepy than migrainey. Maybe they should have titled it “Sunosi.”
I’m old enough to have seen the original “Going in Style” in the early 1980s, back when Hollywood movies would show up on network TV a year later. The original old-men-rob-a-bank flick, with George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg, was more poignant. The 2017 remake, with Alan Arkin, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, is more polished for a modern audience. They’re both good. As usual, Arkin inhabits his grumpy-old-man character like none other. I wanted someone to explain to me why Caine, with his English accent, worked in a Queens (New York, not THE queen) steel mill for 30 years.
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