Pierce Brosnan leads a bunch of supposed Misfits through a daring, silly heist
The thrills are very cheap in the latest from ’90s action specialist Renny Harlin
Film Reviews Pierce Brosnan
Renny Harlin’s new movie The Misfits sometimes appears uncertain about how best to assemble the elements of a glamorous heist thriller. However, it is deeply confident about how to assemble elements of an effective trailer: low-slung sports cars and close-ups of their spinning wheels, implying the presence of car chases that barely exist; Jamie Chung doing mid-air martial arts, in what turns out to be a full-on Shrek-style Matrix spoof; Pierce Brosnan grinning like a maniac. The Misfits is so eager to sell itself that it uses the song “How You Like Me Now?” by The Heavy, familiar from its appearance in every movie ad released in 2010, during the opening minutes of the actual movie.
Those opening minutes, like a trailer, are supposed to prepare the audience for fast-paced irreverence. Instead, they play more like a desperate, upfront confession about how cheap this international production will look and sound—a pre-emptive warning that despite a name cast and exciting locations, it will also feature cheesy black-and-white freeze-frames, bit players doing grotesque pantomimes of human behavior, and a female character’s “girl power” being called out as such via horrifying voiceover.
That narration is inexplicably delivered by Nick Cannon, playing a guy who has named himself Ringo after Ringo Starr as a questionable bit. With the hollow, overemphatic intonations of a TV presenter, Ringo introduces Violet (Chung), Wick (Mike Angelo—a charming Thai pop star, not the famous movie critic), The Prince (Rami Jaber), and himself; collectively, they’re a group of good-hearted thieves and con artists who have made it their business to stop bad people by taking their money. (Basically, they’re the team from 6 Underground, only without a seething resentment of humanity lurking underneath their wiseacre exteriors.) Their latest project involves stealing gold from a private prison in the Middle East, owned by Schultz (Tim Roth), who has been funding a terrorist group. Career criminal Richard Pace (Brosnan) has done time in a Schultz-owned facility, so his semi-estranged daughter, Hope (Hermione Corfield), brings him into the heist planning.
At this point, Pierce Brosnan has played a dissolute middle-aged riff on James Bond more times than he’s played the actual Bond; he’s introduced here stirring, not shaking, a martini. When he shows up, the movie settles down, as if Brosnan’s jaunty presence is putting everyone else at ease. When Brosnan gives a goofy departing hand salute at his enemy as elevator doors close, The Misfits doesn’t become good, exactly. But it’s around this point that the movie focuses more on the pleasures of its core clichés—the elaborate heist planning, the nicely underplayed father-daughter relationship—rather than stumbling through a garbage pile of disconnected enticements. Cannon’s early narration winds up performing a con-like function: Its cessation around the 20-minute mark makes the rest of the movie seem vastly superior by comparison.
On the other hand, it also means that Cannon wears out his welcome well before he breaks out mincing fake accents and zany cross-racial disguises during the actual heist. The Misfits will not be noted in the future for its forward-looking vision of the Middle East, despite co-funding from FilmGate, an Abu Dhabi-based company. It often looks like a paid advertisement for United Arab Emirates tourism, made with the stipulation that any truly luxurious freebies would be provided only after the completion of principal photography. In other words, much of the movie appears to have been shot in a series of hotel lobbies. Apart from the indistinct prison the team breaks into, the settings are vaguely fancy but not lived-in. No wonder Roth’s Schultz never seems more than mildly interested in catching his adversaries. Nothing in the movie, from spiting the bad guy to absconding with gold bars to apprehending the thieves, seems like a genuinely big score to anyone involved.
Yet Brosnan’s occasional self-amused cackles of delight do have an infectious charm, as do the non-Cannon members of his scrappy, ragtag group of, uh, attractive and successful professionals. (Despite the title, and a groan-worthy early gag about cycling through possible team names, they are not misfits by any reasonable definition of the word.) Corfield does a nice job locating small moments of affection within the disappointment she supposedly feels with her onscreen dad, and Chung, playing a humor-impaired ass-kicker, maintains some of her deadpan nonchalance from TV’s The Gifted.
Plus, it’s hard to get too ticked off at a movie heist predicated on a scene of mass vomiting. The Misfits has moments of silliness that bear glancing resemblance to the kind of enjoyable starry, big-studio shlock Renny Harlin used to make, in between the parts that resemble the lower-rent genre efforts he churns out now. It’s easier to imagine a brawnier or more lurid version of this material, though not as easy as it is to forget about the movie entirely. It’s as briefly functional and highly disposable as a hotel key-card.
36 Comments
It’s Renny Harlin, dude, expecting cheap thrills is a requirement, so sounds like he delivered.
Long Kiss Goodnight is a fave of mine, but I don’t know that I’ve actually enjoyed anything since 12 Rounds… though to be fair the only thing of his I’ve seen since then is that Hercules movie, which I only watched because Scott Adkins was in it.
I’d love to watch more of his, I haven’t watched Nightmare on Elm Street 4 or Cutthroat Island- and I’d love to watch the film that killed a genre.Personally, I love Cliffhangers, Deep Blue Sea, and Mindhunters, all three are schlocky to varying levels, never perfect or even good, but fun watches.
The Long Kiss Goodnight is a fucking masterpiece of stupid 90s action. It’s borderline criminal how badly that movie is overlooked.
I always think this, but then I also have a constant Shane Black boner, so I assume I’m biased.
The review alludes to this, but Harlin’s thrills at their best were not cheap — Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea and Die Harder have sets and setpieces as opposed to hotel lobbies. This sounds dispiriting.
It’s sort of a mixed bag. It definitely lacks what his ’90s movies have now: Namely that when you watch them, you’re like, wow, I know this is considered pretty cheesy/hacky stuff, but this looks so polished and almost classical compared to a lot of blockbuster-y action/genre pieces now! Predator 2 is not a distinguished motion picture, but it looks pretty cool! Deep Blue Sea is no Jaws, but it moves! It’s a bummer how little this one feels like a throwback to that stuff, but there is something charming about its cheesiness.
“Apart from the indistinct prison the team breaks into…” Most of the scenes do look indistinct, but the trailer at least leans pretty heavily on the very distinct Institute of Science and Technology at Masdar City designed by Norman Foster to stand in as a prison:and also includes a brief clip of the Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel (it’s Abu Dhabi’s premier cultural attraction, so I’m guessing the film doesn’t try to make that one a prison, though the trailer suggests it does):
At this point, Pierce Brosnan has played a dissolute middle-aged riff on James Bond more times than he’s played the actual Bond
I think my favorite example of this is in The Tailor of Panama…he really nails the sleazeball aspect of a Bond-esque spy and helps make the movie fairly entertaining (if not exactly good from what I remember).
“collectively, they’re a group of good-hearted thieves and con artists who have made it their business to stop bad people by taking their money.”No! No no no no! Stop this fucking idiocy, moviemakers! Stealing shit is awesome because it is stealing shit, it is enjoyable because it is bad, full stop! Trying to make criminals “good guys” both makes them incredibly lame and also makes actual moral issues and wrestling with bad choices and the entire concept of characters that are not cardboard avatars of flimsy virtue seem strange and confusing in mainstream movies! Eat shit, nice crooks!EDIT: I just rewatched The Hot Rock, which I still can’t love the way others enjoy it (issues with Redford’s casting, tonal problems, general “you messed up the book”-itis) but man, it never pretends these aren’t guys who steal shit and that’s that. It doesn’t make them killers, this is a comic caper flick, but it doesn’t fake a high ground either. More of that kind of thing!
Yeah, I sort of blame the Ocean’s movies for this, even though a good chunk of their motivation was “Stealing shit is awesome.”
I think 13 has the straight up “we’re out for vengeance because you injured Elliot Gould” plot, right? At least by that point everyone in the audience likes our gang of crooks and can get on board (also how dare you injure national treasure Elliot Gould). The original does a good job of making most of the gang just crooks working a cool gig and making Andy Garcia a dick, but the personal aspect isn’t a moral good, it’s Clooney feeling jilted and Roberts realizing Garcia is, in fact, a dick.
Top-secret: There’s a “good” reason why the “bad guys” were turned into good guys and vice versa — let’s just say..
I was going to quickly scroll through this then close the tab and probably never watch the movie until I saw “Renny Harlin.” That’s an automatic watch for me.
Good Luck with your self-flagellation.
Not enough angsty superpowered ASBO chavs in these Misfits.
“ASBO”?
I think it stands for “anti-social behavior order”. Very relevant to the UK teen superhero show Misfits.https://www.avclub.com/tv/reviews/misfits
Ahh..I see! As in the one which got ripped-off by MTV® in the Stateside, no?Or WAAAIIITTTT.. Was that ‘Skins®’?Ahh.. Well! Regardless of whatever experiment in teen-genre from UK’s ever-maverick Channel 4® that was, comparing any of it to…..This thinly-veiled agitprop tantamounts to nothing short of sacrilege.
Yeah, that was Skins.Misfits was going to have an American adaptation (on Freeform, no less), but I think they realized that once they took out all the cursing and sex it became just an even shittier Heroes.
Welp..Is your thesis of “de-sexualised” and otherwise-tamer based on some non-showbiz news-report — or worse, simply the trope of “uNiQueLy eViL” TWDC® always being on a holy-war against anything to do with “adult”, especially human-sexuality?Bother to reply only if radically-honest, as in, sufficiently-forthcoming. Not to be confused with being uncivil, if not polite. 🤪😉😬Speaking of “holy-wars”, and well.. More precisely, geopolitics: You oughta check-out my max 2 contributions-as-replies to my parent-comment in this very commenting-board/-forum. I shall disclaim beforehand that my moderately-lengthy additions don’t predominantly deal with “the topic” of this [mini-]site i.e. escapism in showbiz-gossip. However, I shan’t be ‘sorry’ for that as the objective of my additions is to educate readers of a newly-found agitprop phenomenon outside of armed-forces/military related plots( well.. not that “newly-found” given it used to occur widely as latest as the preceding-century, obviously not from that region — so in a globalist vantage-point, it’s merely ‘resurgent’) pro bono over how new frontiers have started to [re-]exploit even brainless/mindless entertainment in order to compensate the incremental loss-of-trust in a traditional-mode for doing so: “News”.⏎Bother to process that only-&-only if you could afford to #SpreadTheWord wherever relevant, though.
‘ll watch it because of Bronson
On the upside, The Broz is aging a lot better than Roger Moore did.
I seem to remember Roger Moore aging semi-gracefully – he basically looked like he did in A View to a Kill for almost 20 years – and then suddenly age hit him like a ton of bricks.
Yeah. I somehow think Pierce is gonna be a great looking 90 year old.
Dude was such a stone silver fox in the Mamma Mia! movies that nobody gave a damn that he couldn’t sing.
Has anyone else seen Skiptrace?I’m amazed it didn’t get a bigger release here, Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville is one of those pairings you don’t immediately think of but when you see the names together, you realize how obvious it is in retrospect.
Jackie Chan should be in at least one Jackass movie. I’d love to see him stuntman-dodge the High Five.
People are still giving Renny Harlin money to make movies? Why?
He’s made a bunch of awesome ones.
Because no other high-profile director might be desperate enough to be a vehicle for harder-than-soft-power churn from your country?
Has any song ever been as over-represented on soundtracks as “How You Like Me Now?”?There are plenty of songs that are in altogether too many films (some of these songs are very good!) – Sabotage, White Rabbit, anything in Cruella, Suicide Squad or Forrest Gump, etc., but no songs that immediately spring to mind that would otherwise be so obscure.I have noticed that some artists seem to dominate the soundtrack game, as compared to their general fame. Two of my favourite bands, in fact – Run The Jewels (perhaps due to the quality of their production) and Eels (if I had to guess, due to Mark E’s emotional articulacy) . I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Eels had earned more from endless OST appearances than any record sales or tours.
*semi_charmed_life has entered the chat*
This feature is a cross between agitprop and a good ol’ tourism-plug by that “federalist” country — Yaaawwwnnn… Who even pretends to care about creativity, eh?I meant.. Were they even trying to hide why they made this?Mr Brosnan was clearly stunt-cast to……Phone it in.Seriously: How could this be review as generous as “C”? Is G/O® Media being part-funded by the U A of E, as well? Or.. Shall I chalk-it-up to this being yet-another one of G/O®’s idiosyncrasies?
P.S. Ahh..Welp!The explosive-revelation is that indeed, my educated-speculation was spot-on.(Errrmmm.. To be radically-honest, it was actually based on local-news reports which in turn were based on not just “breadcrumbs” but leaked-stills from [South ]Korean screening( it had its global-premiere there as a wide-release) on Twitter® of this confirmed[ through Korean subtitles] that it was meant to attack a particular nation-State and by extension, the socio-political pro-democracy movement demonized as yet-another scare word by the fReE press based out of ‘Euro Christian’-descended societies.)As the film had not just explicitly verbal motifs against the said pro-Islāmic democracy movement, but even visual ones of varying disambiguations unlike the original final-cut awaiting release till last-year( when its original-promotions were released), which, as this piece of maverick investigative-journalism points out, was only haphazardly-modified at the very 11th hour after a certain geopolitical-breakthrough after 45th POTUS ‘the Dotard’ was confirmed to be leaving office. ‘Course unlike the reports by backpacking fReE press( most of those recognisable-names enjoy brib.. err.. tax-credits in addition to “slave” labour incentives) HQed regionally in the very same “federalist” of a secular, mOdErAtE[ly] torturing, extraterritorial-hits-as-“accidents”-ordering, multinational-smartphone-hacking-through-military-grade-spyware( even “iDevices”!)-nifty-for-”zero-click”-exploits-executed-through-CIA-FBI-NSA-retirees-pioneering surveillance country who also [predominantly-]funded this project: https://aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeera-world/2021/9/10/the-story-behind-the-scenes.As the investigation reveals, while the project itself might not have been conceived as anything remotely to do with any strand of politics, nevermind geopolitics in particular — as a just-another swashbuckling popcorn-blockbuster hopeful( an “action-comedy”) well into the halfway of its pre-production stage, it could one-&-only go onto the floors once the vivid WGA-superceding developments ensured that the newly-“collaborating” producers could have the stranglehold over the whole production. Turns out.. A decade or so after landing in an international-controversy over endorsing a tobacco-products brand, it has been substantiated well beyond any reasonable-doubt that those who’re widely-recognised for playing misogynist of rape-y icons like James Bond® can hardly be mistaken for having moral-convictions. Nevermind underlings in those other “diverse” cast-members participating wilfully in this incendiary-cashgrab meant with the sole purpose of confirming the venomous toxic culture-supremacist worldview of ‘Euro Christian’-descended [movie-watching ]masses after failing to propagate the same for more than half-a-decade through their directly-controlled press — as well as leveraging the incentives to said fReE press to pressure them into being equitable partners-in-crime.(The fReE press did participate, make no mistake, however, Thanks to their patriotic-prejudices seeing the whole [still-ongoing ]saga as nothing more than [colossal ]“infighting” between NATO-FVEY “allies” — they only went as far as little more than “both sides”-ism.)
Sidenote: Wall Street-listed, and struggling remerged[-for-another-time] global media-empire ViacomCBS®, which in turn is a “subsidiary” of obscurely-recognised corporate moniker National Amusements® and therefore, not an ounce of voting-rights to those outside the Redstone ex-fam — had their film-distribution unit of “Michael Bay-fucking” Paramount® Pictures release this in many territories, including but not limited to, the home-market in U S of A — in spite of their yet-another, months-long struggle to take control of MIRAMAX® — an indie-label which is under an ever-changing ownership since their compatriot, also publicly-listed pure-media Empire in “uNiQueLy eViL” TWDC® divested since about a decade ago.That. Is. It. That’s the message!So no.. I won’t speculate over the fate of the former’s now-majority owned JV since that much of gossip would render me as no different than stereotypical [“fIrSt World”-based ]keyboard-warriors relentlessly spewing their venom of culture-supremacy.(P.P.S. This was to be included in the revision of my latest-reply, however — Thanks to my thoughtfulness( at least in posting my own inputs) unhelped by the evergreen Kinja®’s oppressive-policy of 15 mins max, at most, I couldn’t add the aforementioned “sidenote”-paragraph over there. Nevermind all of the corrections/improvements, which can not be made ‘anyhow’. Ahh.. Well! As is the silver-lining in my yet-another type of ‘perennial-misfortune’, at least I got to have the 2nd-go at proofreading and make adjustment[s] accordingly.)