Posts Tagged ‘Carlo Rota’

TRIGGER POINT: 2 STARS. “looks good when the bullets are flying.”

“Trigger Point,” a new action movie starring Barry Pepper and now on VOD, is stylish looking and features good actors but suffers from a bad case of been there, done that.

Pepper is Lewis, a retiree leading a quiet life in a quiet upstate New York town. His days are spent at the local diner, flirting with waitress Janice (Nazneen Contractor) and sipping tea at the quaint local book store.

His home life, however, isn’t so quaint. His cabin-in-the-woods is a veritable fortress, complete with high tech surveillance gear and drone security.

Turns out Lewis is actually Nicolas Shaw, a former superspy for a shady operation called The Agency. In hiding after his actions resulted in the assassinations of his entire team, he’s brought back into the dangerous world of international intrigue by his former handler Elias Kane (Colm Feore).

Kane’s daughter Monica (Eve Harlow) has been kidnapped by the shadowy figure who may have been responsible for the methodical murder of Shaw’s team.

So, just when he thought he was out, Shaw is dragged back to the underworld to rescue Monica and search down the man responsible for his professional and personal undoing.

“Trigger Point” director Brad Turner has a long and varied list of television credits, including episodes of “MacGyver,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Hawaii Five-O.” He knows how to shoot action and where to put the camera so the movie looks good when the bullets are flying.

He’s also good at casting interesting looking, solemn-faced actors like Pepper, Feore and Carlo Rota, all of whom have tread this territory before.

It’s in the storytelling that things go south. Weighed down by tough guy banalities, there is very little in “Trigger Point” that we haven’t seen before and done better. The actors breathe whatever life they can into this collection of clichés but no amount of grim determination can elevate this above the level of a forgettable direct to video time waster.

A PERFECT PLAN: 2 STARS. “Not challenging or memorable, but gets the job done.”

“A Perfect Plan” is a new crime drama starring William Forsythe but it feels like something we’ve seen before, as though it was Frankensteined together from other movies.

The film begins in a bunker where four kidnapped criminals have been brought together. There’s criminal mastermind Grayson (William Forsythe), sleek-fingered safecracker Kate (Kathleen Munroe), graceful cat burglar Magdalene (Gia Sandhu), and the brawny mechanic Rowan (Michael Hough). “You have to appreciate the humour of the situation,” Grayson says. “Four thieves, locked up, and we haven’t even committed a crime yet.”

It soon becomes clear that they are the pawns of Theo (Carlo Rota), the orchestrator of the situation who watches them on closed circuit cameras. The four strangers eventually figure out their mission, plan a perfect crime in just six hours or get blown to smithereens. “I don’t trust you,” Grayson says, “after all, we’re all criminals.” If they are to survive, they must combine their collective wits and abilities and work together.

There is little about “A Perfect Plan” that doesn’t bring on a sense of déjà vu. The dialogue is torn from the “Tough Guy’s Compendium of Sayings and Slang” and we’ve seen random groups of misfits in more movies than I can count. Ditto the time limit device. Even the title is recycled from a Diane Kruger movie but in its own modest way the film is a kind of comfort food. Nothing challenging or memorable, but it gets the job done.