Force of Nature
Director - Michael Polish
Writer - Cory Miller
Starring - Emile Hirsch, Mel Gibson, Kate Bosworth, Stephanie Cayo, David Zayas
Force of Nature is a throwback action movie largely set in a single apartment building which immediately draws unfavourable comparisons to Die Hard and The Raid. The screenplay attempts to update the straightforward no-nonsense action movies of the past to 2020 standards with token references to policing issues such as racial profiling, minority representation in policing, and police shootings while also being a pulpy action movie centered around stolen Nazi art. The two are not completely incompatible but is a very fine line to balance which it is not surprising that the Mel Gibson straight-to-VOD move fails to get right, ultimately failing at both.
Force of Nature opens, as all great movies do, in media res to a muddled, rainy action sequence in which Mel Gibson is trying to line up a shot on a generic bad guy sluggishly fighting Emile Hirsch. Before anything interesting happening, the credits roll and the film jumps to earlier that day revealing the setting as San Juan with no fewer than 19 establishing shots of the city in the first few minutes of the film. Confoundingly, some of these shots are used to track several characters across the city, but several are just inserted at random into scenes taking place in one room. These nineteen establishing shots frame a generic bad guy we literally never learn anything about (David Zayas) forcing an old woman to open her safe deposit box and hand over a painting before killing her and his partner in crime in the middle of the bank and just driving away. Overtop of these establishing shots and boring bank robbery are radio reports of the imminent arrival of a hurricane setting the stage for the rainy “climax” promised in the pre-credits scene.
The movie then cuts to a very sad Cardillo (Hirsch) framed entirely in blue sitting in his bathtub contemplating suicide before just getting up and going to his job as a police officer; so essentially what Chris McCandless would have grown up to be if he didn’t die a stupid death properly befitting the stupid person he was. It should be noted that despite working as a police officer in San Juan, Cardillo doesn’t know a single word of Spanish; a fact that is mostly played for laughs as his partner for the day, Pena (Cayo) translates the one conversation where his language skills are lacking with the plucky enthusiasm of a rookie cop looking for a promotion. They are tasked with rounding up stragglers and taking them to shelter before the hurricane hits and are then side tracked to a dispute between two customers at a grocery store regarding the amount of meat one is buying. One of the men, Griffin (Will Catlett), insists he has to feed his pet before he can go to the shelter so the cops just decide to stop off at his apartment building so he can do just that.
Also residing at this apartment building are two old racists, a literal Nazi and Mel Gibson, who are refusing to go to the shelter. Mel, because he thinks people these days are pussies, and the Nazi because he doesn’t want to leave his apartment that is loaded with artwork he stole in the war. I should point out that I just spoiled the one enjoyable moment in the movie; about 70 minutes in after having zero lines, it is fully revealed that the bad guys are here to steal this art, the Nazi says “I’ve had it since the war” in a comicly bad German accent revealing that he isn’t just some doddering old man with an art collection but a fucking Nazi. I don’t feel bad about spoiling this hilarious moment, you should not watch this movie.
Anyways, yeah, so the bad guy from earlier shows up with more nameless henchmen he can kill himself to steal this stolen art in the middle of a hurricane when nobody will be paying attention to anything. This is a correct assumption because it really doesn’t seem like the police in this movie care about the brazen murder of an old woman in the middle of a bank in broad daylight. For the first two-thirds of the movie these are clearly the bad guys, but then Mr. Nazi goes and outs himself as a Nazi which really muddies the waters here; sure if the bad guys succeed then the artwork will now be in the hands of the Puerto Rican criminal syndicate but is that really any worse than being in the hands of a fucking Nazi?
The bad guys and the “good” guys get into various standoffs though of course the “good” guys consist of Mel Gibson playing an old, irate, probably racist, loser, Cardillo, the suicidal cop who is later revealed to have murdered his partner during a raid gone wrong, Pena, a cop who’s to-date greatest success involved her racially profiling a man on the street as being Puerto Rican, in Puerto Rico, and getting lucky that he had a bag of cocaine stuffed up his ass, a Nazi, a black guy with a pet tiger, and Kate Bosworth playing a lady doctor who is also Mel Gibson’s daughter.
A quick note about that tiger, and a spoiler for the end of the movie. If you guessed the $23 million movie that takes place in one location with no stars bigger than 2020 Mel Gibson and no special effects could afford an actual tiger, you are hilariously mistaken. It isn’t even shown in shadows or anything, just a blank space off camera. This is bad when he bites his owner, Griffin, but reaches a special level of awful when the grand climax of the movie involved the bad guy getting fed to the tiger. If you’re going to center your script around The Bad Guy getting eaten by a tiger, you better show the fucking tiger. Sure, the getting eaten action would have been as sloppy and hard-to-see as the other action scenes in the move but it would have been something.
Anyways, boring movie keeps going, the “good” guys win with the old racists being their only casualties. Emily Hirsch becomes less sad and starts banging Kate Bosworth and everybody lives happily ever after despite spending the entire movie in this apartment building they were supposed to be evacuating because it was going to be so dangerous during a hurricane. But they’re all fine because *shrug emoji*
If literal woman-strangler Emile Hirsch, and literal Mel Gibson Mel Gibson are going to continue to get work at least it’s relegated to level of garbage movie that nobody should see and should rightfully be buried where even those who for-some-reason still want to support these men will struggle to find them. This is a garbage movie that isn’t even the fun kind of garbage.
Schurmann Score - 1/10
This review brought to you by Christopher Coe because he's a fucking asshole
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