The Prince (2014)

On the face of it, this movie starts off on the right foot - it has Jason Patric, Bruce Willis, and John Cusack. Hell, it even has Korean pop sensation Rain, who did a great job in Ninja Assassin, a movie I thoroughly enjoyed as a fusion of styles from Tarantino and Frank Miller (although neither man was actually involved in the movie). With this kind of star power, how can things go awry? Well, they do.

I have no idea how much they payed these actors to be in the movie, but the complete budget was only $10 million. I read that Bruce Willis turned down four days of work with The Expendables 3 because he wanted $4m instead of $3m, and having seen that movie, I understand why he didn't really want to be in it, but what would posses him to be a focal character of this movie?

The general idea is that Jason Patric is a bad, bad man who everyone is afraid of. He had retired from a life of being a professionally bad man, but his daughter (played by Gia Mantegna) disappears, and he decides to go hunt down whomever has her and extract her from the situation however he can. The problem is that the build-up explaining how dangerous this character that Jason is playing is incomplete, and he doesn't have the physical menace that you might get from someone like Jason Statham. As a result, he doesn't project the presence that is really needed to pull this role off.

John Cusack has a throw away role. This isn't like the role that he threw away when he was the lead in Poe, as this role is a supporting role that barely registers. Likewise, 50 Cent, Gia, and a host of others are just there to refocus everything on Jason, and Jason can't carry it. The only two people who stand out are Willis, who doesn't really do much other than be the  self-evidently powerful bad guy and his right-hand-man played by Rain. And they don't stand out as much as you'd hope.

Direction was not great
Story was rehashed
Acting was phoned in
Action was okay
Editing was bad

Bottom Line: An action movie where the action was the best of the acting. And it wasn't that great.

1.0/5