What's the deal with Bruce Willis? When he gets a good, meaty role—lately think Eli Roth's Death Wish, M. Knight Shyamalan's Glass, and Edward Norton's very recent Motherless Brooklyn—he displays his star chops as fully intact. Yet it seems like every other month his mug turns up on the cover of another direct-to-video/streaming, bargain-basement action thriller. While they're not all terrible films (I've seen most of them, too; Once Upon a Time in Venice, for instance, wasn't bad), they're frankly beneath him.
So we have 10 Minutes Gone, a film co-produced by now defunct cinema-ticket subscription plan MoviePass. They should've put their bucks into improving the service folks were paying for (and generally not receiving—I was one of them), because despite the top-billed presence of two great stars—Willis is really second fiddle to Michael Chiklis—10 Minutes Gone is barely of interest. Basically it's a jewel heist thriller, with the potentially interesting twist that crew boss Frank (Chiklis) is rendered unconscious during the robbery.
When Frank comes to, his partner (who's also his brother) is dead and he has zero idea how the operation went so disastrously wrong. Not a bad starting place, but director Brian A. Miller can't make anything compelling out of a muddled screenplay. Chiklis tries to bring a little Vic Mackey-style intensity to his role, but he has little to work with. And Willis is confined comfortably to the role he often plays in these cheapies: he appears intermitantly throughout the first two acts—all in one centralized (and non-action oriented) location, in this case a sort of command center—and becomes marginally more important during the film's climax. Here though, unlike say in last year's Reprisal, he doesn't even have to break a sweat. Ten minutes gone? More like 89 after the credits finish rolling. Re-watch Die Hard (any of them) instead.
Blu-ray extras include cast interviews with all the primaries with the exception of Bruce Willis. No surprise there.
So we have 10 Minutes Gone, a film co-produced by now defunct cinema-ticket subscription plan MoviePass. They should've put their bucks into improving the service folks were paying for (and generally not receiving—I was one of them), because despite the top-billed presence of two great stars—Willis is really second fiddle to Michael Chiklis—10 Minutes Gone is barely of interest. Basically it's a jewel heist thriller, with the potentially interesting twist that crew boss Frank (Chiklis) is rendered unconscious during the robbery.
When Frank comes to, his partner (who's also his brother) is dead and he has zero idea how the operation went so disastrously wrong. Not a bad starting place, but director Brian A. Miller can't make anything compelling out of a muddled screenplay. Chiklis tries to bring a little Vic Mackey-style intensity to his role, but he has little to work with. And Willis is confined comfortably to the role he often plays in these cheapies: he appears intermitantly throughout the first two acts—all in one centralized (and non-action oriented) location, in this case a sort of command center—and becomes marginally more important during the film's climax. Here though, unlike say in last year's Reprisal, he doesn't even have to break a sweat. Ten minutes gone? More like 89 after the credits finish rolling. Re-watch Die Hard (any of them) instead.
Blu-ray extras include cast interviews with all the primaries with the exception of Bruce Willis. No surprise there.
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