Mr. Movie: ‘The Doorman’ has one-two punch in Rose and Reno
The Doorman
Action flicks like “The Doorman” have predictable outcomes. The hero or heroine win out in the end and the bad guys die in the order of their importance to the story. An actor getting cast in the fifth or sixth spot a movie usually suffers the fate of those security people that used to accompany Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk to the surface of this planet or that.
They died quickly and often in the opening sequence aired just before the overly long, “Space… the final frontier” intro.
When it comes to a full length feature film, death doesn’t come quite that quickly. Often that character can last up to 20-minutes and sometimes even a bit more. However, last, they do not.
All of this gives you the basic formula for this kind of action flick. What it doesn’t define is how the plot goes. And how the plot goes and how much we like the story depends on how it flows from A to B to C and on down the alphabet to Z.
“The Doorman” casts Ruby Rose as Ali. She’s special forces military. Failure on a mission has her bagging the military career for a deep, ugly depression. A family member talks her into applying for a doorman job at a swank hotel that is undergoing a renovation. An old couple and a widower with two kids are the establishment’s only tenants.
She takes a job.
Never mind that two couples and a few workmen really don’t need a doorman much less two of them. The main doorman just happens to be a criminal and a flunky working for Jean Reno’s Victor Dubois. He’s after some priceless art that he and the old guy stole eons ago. Turns out the art treasures are hidden in — yep, you guessed it — the apartment of the widower and his kids.
It also just “happens” that Ali is the sister of the late wife and she and the hubby have a stressed relationship because of events that happened in the past. When Dubois’ goons start killing people the elite military part of her switches on and Ali leaps into predictable action with predictable action ups and downs which leads us back to A to B to C.
At this point our trip through the alphabet starts with the movie’s two known actors. Of course, the film’s one-two punch is Rose and Reno. He is one of my all-time favorite character actors. I love him a lot more as a good guy than a villain. Reno does Dubois very low key. He’s a nice man who smiles a lot and is very polite. Dubois is the perfect gentleman who won’t soil his own hands with someone’s blood but doesn’t hesitate to have the goons take care of business in the deadliest of ways.
It’s not the best I’ve ever seen Reno but it’s a good part for him.
Rose is the complete opposite of Reno. His battery is on recharge. She’s supercharged. You totally believe Rose can more than handle Dubois’ baddies and then some. Her combat scenes are where director Ryuhei Kitamura shines and where his movie really works. Rose (“John Wick: Chapter 2,” “xXx: Return of Xander Cage,” TV’s “Batwoman”) also manages to make her character as vulnerable as she is tough.
It’s a nice mix.
Kitamura, who you probably haven’t heard of, and the film’s writers you also probably don’t know, manage to put “The Doorman” in the middle of the pack when it comes to the A to B to C thing. They have created characters who are as cliche as they come. The henchmen are laughably predictable. The kids are even worse.
The good news is Kitamura is not bad as an action director and even better news is that the movie isn’t horrible. However, considering how good this genre can be, it’s nothing to write home about.
So why does it work? Two reasons. Rose and Reno but especially Rose.
▪ Rated R for violence, mature themes and language. It’s streaming on a number of sites as view on demand.
▪ Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5
The Lie
“The Lie” is a Blumhouse Productions thriller that was introduced at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2018. After sitting on the shelf for awhile, Amazon picked up the distribution rights and it’s just now being released to the rest of the world.
So what’s that tell ya? The general rule is that movies sitting for that length of time pretty much suck.
What’s unfortunate is the story has potential and it could have been very good. Mom and dad are divorced. It’s his time with the kid. He’s taking her to a musical event when she sees a friend standing by the side of the road. She pleads with dad to pick her up. Reluctantly, he does. A few miles up the road, the girl says her bladder is busting and needs some relief.
Dad lets her and the daughter out. They run into the woods and don’t come back for a long time. He starts looking for them and finds his daughter sitting on the rail of a bridge that crosses a roaring river by a waterfall. She tells her dad that she deliberately pushed her friend off of the rail and into the raging river.
That sets first dad and then mom to covering up their daughter’s crime. It’s an intriguing scenario that asks a good question. What would you do? After all, your daughter is just 15, no one knows the girl was picked up and no one knows this and no one knows that.
Great questions that flop in a film that fails to give its characters anything resembling three dimensions.
Like all movie plans, when characters practice to deceive, things get movie complicated. In this case the complications are from stupid things the girl does and the stupid things her parents do to save her skin.
In this case the stupid things are eye-rolling stupid. You’ll find it almost impossible to believe that people as obviously intelligent as this man and woman could be that dense. Worse, it’s hard to like people as shallow as the two parents and as shallow as their daughter.
That’s deliberate. However, you do want to feel something for the poor parents torn between loyalty and love for their daughter and the reality that they really ought to do the right thing and tell the truth.
Unfortunately, these characters are so superficial, and the screenplay is so poorly written and executed that you don’t feel anything for any of them. You don’t even feel badly about the dead girl or her stressed out dad when he comes knocking early in the lying phase.
Golden Globe nominees Peter Sarsgaard and Mireille Enos star as the parents and Joey King —also a Golden Globe nominee — star as their daughter. They’re all exceptionally good. King is the best of the bunch as she bounces between a teen torn to pieces over what she’s done and a kid who can’t be bothered with the details.
It’s chilling and oh, so sociopathic.
A lot of praise also goes to Sarsgaard (“An Education”) and Enos (TV’s “The Killing”). They do the best they can with an ugly story packed with facile people, and one that bounces for way too long down an ugly road toward a really ugly and not all that surprising climax.
The film is written and directed by Veena Sud (2016’s “The Salton Sea”). She bases it on a “Wir Monsters,” a German film done in 2015. It is — along with a bunch of others done about the same time — based on the murder of Meredith Kercher. That’s the woman Amanda Knox is accused of murdering.
If it’s based on that, I failed to see the similarity. Worse, is a failure to see any point to the movie at all.
▪ Rated R for mature themes, language and some violence. It’s streaming as view on demand on Amazon.
▪ Rating: 1 out of 5
This story was originally published October 8, 2020 at 6:52 PM with the headline "Mr. Movie: ‘The Doorman’ has one-two punch in Rose and Reno."