Review No.15: Mercenaries

As a former video shop employee I can smell a straight-to-DVD title a mile off with these films typically having a slightly familiar name attached to them but generally having a vague plot structure. So when I came across a film that starred Billy Zane as the commander in charge of a group of mercenaries tasked with rescuing the American ambassador from a group of Serbian war criminals I instantly thought it would bypass the cinema. This obviously wasn't the case as Mercenaries was released in cinemas last week and even though it will be coming to DVD very soon its brief time on the big screen means it warrants a review here. The film follows Robert Fucilla's Andy Marlow the head of a group of elite killers sent to retrieve said ambassador by trekking across treacherous Serbian ground in order to carry out their mission. Alongside Mister Zane there are some familiar faces such as Guy Ritchie regular Vas Blackwood as well as Thomas from Downton Abbey. There didn't really seem to be much of a script for Mercenaries and if there were most of the words would've probably been bang, bang, kill, kill, dead. It doesn't take long for the ambassador to be rescued however with a group of rebels as well as a villain wearing an eye patch chasing them will all of our actors make it back to Zane unscathed?

I don't think I was asking very much for Mercenaries I was more than aware that this was just going to be a brainless action film and I was more than prepared for it and while some of my friends would say that that really isn't my genre of choice if it's done well I've got no problem with it. But this film really isn't done well and for a film with that amount of violence and death I found it fairly dull in places. Fucilla isn't a strong lead while the best members of the cast, namely Blackwood and Zane, aren't given that much screen time. There is also an attempt to create a romance between Andy and the kickass female character Beatrice but again this peters out once again while the conclusion is incredibly flat. This was a good idea in theory but this was painfully executed, ironically as a lot of the bad guys are here, therefore I wonder why it was given a cinematic release in the first place.

Verdict: A film that really should've gone straight to DVD but not the worse I've seen this year I'll have to give it 2.5/10.