Dimitri Logothetis, the filmmaker of Jiu Jitsu, which was released in 2020 and earned Nicolas Cage, Tony Jaa, and Frank Grillo attention, made a terrible impression on film enthusiasts. Did any of them ever have even a glimmer of hope that he would recover and star in a Luke Hemsworth vehicle. Gunner is another one of those films that has no story to cover up the action. It is an argle bargle from the 80s and 90s, where the big guy yelling and blowing things up is the center of the plot with incompetent henchmen all around him. Morgan Freeman needs to have bubbled up things all around to assist the very first of the Gunner was not at Freeman’s level. The plot of JD and the American Beast is a broken telephone parody of a Universal Soldier sequel, with even more boring lines, incompetent acting, and incompetent action design in a low budget film with poor pacing that tries to insert a ton of digital dressings into combat but fails.
Lee Gunner is vengefully portrayed by Australian actor Chris Hemsworth (who returned from Afghanistan). He is active in the Clinton bar owned by his wife Clarie. Lee claims that rough bikers and drug pushers prefer to torture customers in the bar or put their knives on the dartboard. Well, it isn’t until some idiots go too far one night that Lee is able to do much about it. He sees for himself that no one messes with him and begins to retaliate. Lee takes a relaxing camping trip with his sons, the teenage boy Travis (Connor DeWolfe) and baby Luke (Grant Feely), and their Uncle Jon (Barry Jay Minoff) and they happen upon a Fentanyl supply chain. Uncle Jon is murdered, Lee’s children are captured, and only one man can rescue them Lee Gunner.
Logothetis and co writer Gary Scott Thompson do a disservice on bringing the appropriate style into their pen and deliver a dreary script consisting of genre clichés. Gunner is one of those “drink if you’ve watched this before” films except if you followed the said rule, you would have been thirty racks deep before the first intermission. Expect to treat your taste buds to The Sacrificial Family Member, The Bullheaded Supervising Agent, and The Invincible Protagonist as though consistency is the essence of a meal. The film consists of what appears to be a decaying zombie carcass that has already been stripped to the bone by vultures. The genre vocabulary of Logothetis does not expand which may be a powerful asset since the handful that is there gets pounded into submission over and over.
Everything about Gunner is miserable, regardless of which aspect of the movie making you compare it to. Green screen backgrounds incorporate horrendous color correction that does a poor job of trying to recreate deceitful driving scenes. Explosive muzzle flashes and ammunition streaks look like fast tracked Adobe After Effects blunders made by someone who was about to run out of their subscription. And then there are the terrible cut edits made to ridiculous instances of skydiving or the terribly fake helicopters and even stunt work of characters having been replaced by even worse quality digitally composed rubbish. Logothetis’ crew better have been challenged by both finances and time because otherwise there is no rationale for such content which looks like a rough draft typed out on a computer.
Now if the action was done better, maybe those with the reliance on thrill would be able to overlook the horrendous “story” progression but that’s not the case with Gunner. There is no creativity present apart from the unimaginative point and shoot routine except for in the beginning scuffle at the pub where Lee hammers some leather wearing thugs over the head with dartboard. Where John Wick paints horror with his blasters, making them like a paint brush with no limits, Lee Gunner is an insult to shooting range dolls. Logothetis ignite a few fireballs when things go boom, but even then it is children’s toys level of sophistication. It appears like an over the top movie with ideas that could not make it past the preliminary planning stage. There is a very churn and burn quality to Logothetis’ style which is putting it too mildly.
So here’s the thing; Hemsworth is not even at fault the eldest brother is given some scribbled words on tissue. Lee Gunner is a DList, Redbox ass soldier boy who clinks his medals of honor and manages to mumble through lines that would make Rambo look like he had an easy time during the three movies in geez, the dude was atrocious. Mykel Shannon Jenkins is playing this almost comically awful laughing fledgling daddy’s boy villain while help me out here, every time Dobbs Ryker laughs, it causes the barely existing momentum to come to a screeching halt. You feel that Logothetis attempts to imbue humour into Gunner, but with the inaccuracy of the film has largely rendered such choices, such as Ryker’s roaring laugh, highly out of context. The same kind of observation could be made about Freeman’s quiet roles because even he looks of bewilderment in regard to the stupidity of the film’s tone, while he is acting. But then again, perhaps Jenkins is desperately looking for the heart of the matter where the rest of the cast are all monotone and lack any life while rehearsing their dialogues.
If you’ve been paying attention carefully, you might begin to speculate how Logothetis quickly plunges his character Gunner into a hole so deep that it is near impossible to get out But why would you even try. You see, the problem is that Logothetis is almost dead when it comes to managing the final cut of his movies thus giving birth to careless action sequences that are randomly edited with tracks on the Internet that let you make a meme and find better sound. The artistic touch of cinematography depends largely on the availability of set locations. The sound design is terrible as the pacing of cuts is likened to that of a record player being unavailable. Whatever respect Logothetis tries to relay in that last scene depicting American armed service members completely evaporates when he makes his point. Forget Gunner holding a candle to Jack Reacher as the movie isn’t even good enough to stand near that comparison this film is barely striving to be ‘watchable’. But you have witnessed this redundancy of forgettable action flicks in the past and it has been far superior to this one.
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