There’s something to be said for the power of a formulaic action thriller. The motion picture as fatty snack food has its place in any healthy cinematic diet, but it’s gotta come in bite size, easy to chew serving sizes. A flick like Close Range has the right idea. It opens in media res, is less than ninety minutes in length, and a reasonably conscious child could process its narrative. It’s a straightforward, unambitious piece of popcorn fluff, but its execution holds it back from being truly effective.
Close Range is less a movie and more a feature length demo reel for star Scott Adkins, who plays Colton MacReady, the type of vague ex-soldier turned roaming badass who typically leads this type of project. His sister’s idiot husband gets into trouble with a drug cartel, so MacReady has to save her and her niece from a crooked sheriff working for said cartel. It’s basically a lot of Screenwriting 101 stuff, repeated Girl In Jeopardy machinations punctuated by brash bursts of death by blade, bullet or motor vehicle. There are other details and bits of background peppered throughout, but they couldn’t possibly matter less. In this film, characterization and theme are just the fine print nutritional facts on the side of the wrapper. If you’re watching this, you know what you came for.
As MacReady, Adkins resembles a jacked Milo Ventimiglia, with his soft featured good looks roughed up by a buzzcut and some stubble. In almost every way, he is the post-millennial Chuck Norris, a screen presence that speeds so far past irony it zooms back around to an earnestness that is as baffling as it is endearing. Adkins is an Englishman, but as Typical Middle American Masculinity Cypher, he chews on truly pathetic dialogue like so much cud, relishing every piece of tough talk he gets to spew. Everything about the film’s faux western aesthetic seems more informed by the music video oeuvre of Toby Keith than anything John Ford ever made, and “Do I look like I have fucking friends?” is a line written for a far surlier than Adkins is capable of being, but he slathers it in such forced apathy that it almost goes down smooth.
Honestly, though, this is a film undone by its audio. The dialogue is typically execrable, but so is the music. The score sounds like someone made a ringtone out of the “Breaking Bad” theme and forgot to switch to airplane mode at the start of the film. Entire conversations are middling exchanges undone by muddled ADR and awkward dubbing. Even gunshots sound hollow in a way that undermines the film’s considerable violence. One gets the distinct feeling this vehicle could only be improved by silence.
The main attraction here is just the opportunity to see Adkins beat the living shit out of bad guys in spectacular fashion, but outside of the film’s excellent opening sequence (itself feeling both like the end of another movie and a shrewd homage to Tony Jaa in The Protector), it leaves a lot of carnage on the table. The set pieces are diverse to a fault, as director Isaac Florentine tries to contrive an audition tape’s worth of scenarios for Adkins to look cool in. See MacReady take his shirt off randomly in front of his young impressionable niece (a scene that implies weird levels of incest not seen since that infamous Folger’s Christmas commercial). See MacReady straight up stab bad guys in the mouth. See him leap over a speeding SUV. The only problem is that Adkins isn’t a particularly diverse action star.
He’s really good at punching and kicking and stabbing but the film insists on wasting our time with poorly realized car chases and bland gun fights. They waste ample screen time establishing names for every single one of the cartel’s weirdly martial arts trained henchman, but so few of them are dispensed with through the kind of terse but balletic hand to hand combat the opening sequence seems to promise. Nick Chinlund delivers an admirable performance as the conflicted corrupt sheriff, but every other player is bland and lifeless, which would be fine if less screen time was wasted on the MacReady family’s past. Close Range misses such an easy target, but it’s still a pretty functional future Netflix selection. It may be best consumed in a conversational setting where friendly banter will drown out its excruciating attempts at melodrama, only to be silenced by scenes of cars exploding.