Friday 31 December 2021

Army of One (2020)

 



After a drug bust goes wrong, resulting in the death of a fellow officer, detective Dillon Baker is struggling with both the guilt, and with the lingering pain of the injury he himself sustained.  As part of his efforts to recover and recuperate, he heads out on a camping trip with his wife, Brenner.

The locals don't seem the friendliest, which maybe makes it a bit unwise for Dillon and Brenner to take shelter in an empty home during a storm.  And even more unwise for them to go poking around as much as they do.  The couple stumble across a secret cache of weapons.  The locals react to this intrusion with lethal force.

And here the movie pulls its 'surprise', though frankly all the marketing already did that.  You see, Brenner Baker isn't just a cop's wife.  She is also a former special forces soldier.  While the crime/militia/religious cult/whatever it is the locals are succeeded in killing Dillon, they only wounded her.  She clambers out of the ditch where they dumped her and begins a one woman quest for vengeance.

Army of One is a pretty standard 'revenge rampage' movie.  These sort of things rest heavily on the person playing the revenge-seeker, and in that regard it does alright.  Ellen Hollman (of Spartacus: Vengeance and Spartacus: War of the Damned) is a convincing presence as Brenner.

Unfortunately, not all the news is so good.  The supporting cast is somewhat uneven, and the script is not terribly good.  It relies quite heavily on the 'everyone in town is in the pocket of the local gang' trope, and the ending misfires.  I can see that they were trying to do something a bit different than the classic 'final hand to hand showdown with the big bad', and I can see why that wouldn't have worked with the specific setup they have created.  But I don't think that what they chose to do instead actually works.

Content warning: the film contains gender-based physical and verbal abuse, unwanted groping, and a lot of references to sexual assault.

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