"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Final Score

If VOD is where we must go to see rugged heroes run through solidly entertaining classical action formulas then I guess that’s what we’ll do. In FINAL SCORE, Dave Bautista (WRONG SIDE OF TOWN) proves that he can handily carry a wholly unoriginal vehicle that knows how to properly operate the machinery of the DIE-HARD-on-a-____ template. To be more specific, this time it’s the SUDDEN DEATH template – DIE-HARD-in-a-hockey-arena-but-in-a-soccer-stadium.

Bautista plays American ex-Marine Michael Knox, who comes to London to bring his teenage “niece” – actually the daughter of a war buddy whose death he blames himself for – to the soccer match. (Yes, he keeps not calling it football, but don’t worry, there’s a part where a guy gets punched out for that very offense.) Unfortunately Uncle Mike and Danni (Lara Peake, HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES)’s outing coincides with a plot by separatists from the ex-Soviet nation of Sukovia (on the eastern border of Sokovia, I believe) trying to find a former rebel leader in hiding and then blow up the stadium.

The bad versions of this type of movie have boring villains of indistinct European descent and dull, interchangeable henchmen. This one has my favorite Punisher, Ray Stevenson as Arkady, and his top guy Vlad is Martyn Ford, the tattooed giant from BOYKA: UNDISPUTED IV and ACCIDENT MAN. Much like characters in DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE and BLADE II, he has a girlfriend on the team, a scar-faced, corn-rowed little monster named Tatiana (Alexandra Dinu, BULLET HEAD) who keeps stealing the movie. And Arkady’s remorseful brother who fakes his death, Dimitri, is Pierce Brosnan (THE LAWNMOWER MAN). He spends much of the movie just watching the match, but when he’s outed and becomes Mike’s hostage and/or accomplice his quiet, knowing squints are very effective.

The bad version of this would also have too polished of an actress to play the niece. Either a generic child actor grown in a test tube or a grown up white bread model who does a little kung fu. This has a more grounded kid, slightly tomboyish, a little rebellious (sneaking out with a douchey boyfriend [Rion Gordon]) but without hair dye or ink or piercing or some shit to visually signify it. Kind of a Lady Sovereign with braces.

When Danni ditches Mike for her boyfriend, Mike tries to get help from an usher named Faisal (Amit Shah, THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEY), who gets dragged into the counterterrorism plot. His knowledge of the stadium becomes useful, but he’s mostly there for comic relief, including a dark and depressing joke where he can’t get a crowd to evacuate the stands until he acquiesces to the reality of racist fear and yells “Allahu akbar!”

Director Scott Mann’s last movie was HEIST, which had a great cast including Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Robert De Niro, Gina Carano and Bautista, but was un-exciting enough to me that I didn’t bother to review it. His debut, however, is a fun one called THE TOURNAMENT, which features a cartoonish subculture of elite assassins pre-JOHN WICK and Scott Adkins playing Russian but not Boyka. The screenplay for FINAL SCORE is credited to THE TOURNAMENT writer Jonathan Frank along with two brothers, David T. Lynch & Keith Lynch.

I found FINAL SCORE to be more entertaining and less insulting than the last DIE HARD inspired movie I saw, SKYSCRAPER. But to be fair the expectations of a V.O.D. movie at home may be easier to satisfy than those of the big screen, especially when the one at home gets to be rated-R and the “real” one doesn’t. I would gladly pay to see straight ahead Bautista vehicles like this in the theater, but you would want this to have a slightly bigger budget.

An enormous amount of suspension of disbelief is required about stadium security protocols and the ability of a crowd of 35,000 to notice gunfire or motorcycle stunts. Or you have to assume that everyone notices but is too invested in the game to get worked up about it. There appear to be astoundingly few security personnel and nobody getting upset that the doors have been blocked so that they can’t leave. But there are quite a few satisfying action moments, with the motorcycle chase through the halls and on the roof especially being fun (even with its obvious green screen). As a wrestler as opposed to martial artist, Bautista is not generally involved in complex choreography, but the action is frequent and varied, with at times shaky but generally comprehensible camera work.

That might not be enough if there wasn’t a strong presence at the center of it all. But once again Bautista provides that winning combo of badassedness and good-hearted sincerity. He’s very convincing as a guy who can crush your skull with his hands but would never do it to most people because he’s a total sweetheart.

An action star like this is mostly playing a type – we want to see as similar characters over and over, he’s not required to reinvent himself, at least not for a while. I think one reason Bautista is so good at it is that he seems to be similar to his screen persona in real life – a scary looking dude who is humble, able to laugh at himself, values being nice to people, but also has a low tolerance for bullshit or for playing the game how he’s probly supposed to. So he’ll be blunt about how the current political situation angers him even though he came from the very conservative world of pro wrestling. He’ll be the first and most frequent to speak out about the orchestrated firing of James Gunn even though it risks what could be the biggest movie role he’ll ever have. And he’ll proudly call FINAL SCORE “good old fashioned far fetched action” in a promotional tweet because he understands what this is and that we do too.

Drax in the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movies is an exaggerated outer space version of those qualities, but the Earth version is very appealing too. Here’s hoping we’ll see plenty more of it, on whatever size screen can hold it.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2018 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Action, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

14 Responses to “Final Score”

  1. I find it funny about making up countries for movies, there’s a British TV Series about forensic pathologists called Silent Witness which has been running since 1996 and they just didn’t care about using real countries like one story was set investigating a mass murder involving the Dutch ambassador to the UK and I think it was even set in their embassy and another which was an on location trip to Hungary which seemed to suggest a lot of their police force was on the take (and had the utterly novel idea of casting an actual English speaking Hungarian actor as the lead police liaison – it was so noticeable because they actually bothered to be accurate).

    Of course then there’s the utterly insane Christopher Walken film (yes, even more than usual) McBain, where they actually overthrow the corrupt military dictatorship of Columbia.

  2. This past weekend, in lieu of queuing up to meet Bautista at a comic-con I opted to go see FINAL SCORE at the one theater that carried it. I’ll support these limited release action films whenever I can and I’ve had a pretty decent run as of late between this, Donnie Yen’s BIG BROTHER(though it’s not really an action movie), and the dumb but agreeable EUROPE RAIDERS. The shaky handheld stuff was a bit disappointing and made it unnecessarily difficult follow some of the action. An easy point of comparison is the kitchen fight in this film and SUDDEN DEATH. But Bautista is a compelling screen presence and his ability to carry a film that makes the whole damn thing hang together. So yeah, for the money I made the right choice.

  3. Did you know that there was recently an episode of NCIS where the team went to Val Verde?

  4. I want the logic of made-up countries applied inside the United States. I’d love to see a redneck biker thriller set in “Tuskeorgia,” the vaguely Southern state which seems kind of like Georgia with a little Tennessee, though it’s shot entirely in British Columbia and peopled entirely by British actors doing vaguely Southern but not specifically Georgian accents.

  5. Apparently I stand corrected. Well, I’d love to see Bautista fight villainous bikers in Mooseylvania, too.

  6. I really enjoyed this one.

  7. STUBER looks funny. The trailer dropped during WrestleMania, where Dave had what turned out to be his last match.

  8. Yeah, this one is definitely on my watchlist. Mostly because of Bautista, because let’s be honest: It looks like a mockbuster of CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE. Interesting that it’s from the director of IT’S ALL GONE PETE TONG. Some people’s directing career takes them to unexpected places.

  9. Watching FINAL SCORE right now. Enjoying every minute of it.

  10. I thoroughly enjoyed this one as well. I appreciated that, given the opportunity to make a choice between “believable” and “awesome,” the filmmakers went with the latter every single time. Call me crazy, but I find ridiculous motorcycle stunts and unlikely explosions a lot more entertaining than proper observation of police procedure and bureaucratic protocol.

  11. I never heard of this one, but it’s got a hellva cast! Based on the universal praise of the review/comments, I’m gonna pick it up. I love Die-Hard-on-A movies.

    I have my own outline for one where a former Black Ops Navy SEAL turned Priest shows up unannounced at his estranged daughter’s wedding, in Vatican City. So, Die Hard at a wedding… in the Vatican.

    It’s title? FOREVER HOLD YOUR PIECE.

  12. I totally forgot I wrote that one. But it was so much fun. The churches actually line up perfectly with Nakatomi Tower.

    He takes off his shoes for ritual foot bathing, then gets his feet cut up on shards of stain glass windows. The air ducts are replaced by catacombs beneath the church. The limbo driver becomes a tour guide. The NYPD vs LAPD thing becomes Catholic vs Protestant religious leaders. And of course the villains are thieves, not terrorists. Turns out the billionaire groom is running an insurance scam and trying to murder his father and take over the family business.

    Maybe I should sit down and actually write it…

  13. It’s funny that my main complaint of Sudden Death (from the one time I saw it) was that it was too serious and not “wacky” enough. So color me surprised that this even more “dark and gritty” version of Sudden Death pretty much improves on it in every way. Great hero, good villains (and especially the villainess), decent action, a surprisingly memorable score (that weirdly reminded me of the score for “Moon”). Also a solid sidekick character and one of the better Pierce Brosnan performances in a while(in a role that seems like a homage to Die Another Day’s most outrageous twist). Batista continues to be one of our most interesting actors and I hope he keeps making meat-and-potatoes actioners like this in between the family and comedy stuff.

Leave a Reply





XHTML: You can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>