105 min | R | October 21, 2022 | Lionsgate
A detective hunts a crew of armored-car robbers dressed as cops while his own badge hangs by a thread. Bruce Willis squints, mutters, and stands in the background of his own franchise. The premise promises a hard-boiled thriller. The movie delivers a placeholder.
Detective James Knight works a Los Angeles beat where a crew of armed robbers hits armored cars while wearing police uniforms. The disguise makes every cop a suspect and turns the city against the department. Knight chases the crew while his own conduct draws scrutiny from the brass. The film positions itself as a story about a good cop pushed past the line and the institution that abandons him. It is really about assembling a marketable action package around a star who appears for minutes at a time.
Bruce Willis plays Knight as a man conserving energy. He delivers his lines flat and low and stays planted in his scenes rather than driving them. Lochlyn Munro plays Eric Fitzgerald and carries the connective tissue that the script hands him. Jimmy Jean-Louis brings real presence as Detective Godwin Sango and gives the partner role more weight than the writing earns. Beau Mirchoff plays Casey Rhodes as the live wire, and Corey Large doubles as Mercer while sharing the screenplay credit.
Edward Drake directs from a script he wrote with Corey Large, and the seams show in the construction. The film leans on shallow-focus close-ups and tight two-shots that keep the frame small and the locations cheap. Scenes built around Willis cut to inserts and reverse angles that let a double or a stand-in absorb the coverage. The score pushes synth stings under dialogue to manufacture tension the staging does not generate. Night exteriors get drowned in teal and orange that flatten the geography of every chase.
This is the opening installment of a trilogy Drake shot in quick succession, and it plays like a pilot stretched to feature length. The cop-robbers-in-cop-clothing hook could anchor a tense procedural about trust inside a department. Drake never develops it past the logline. The movie is competent enough to play and empty enough to forget, a delivery system for a name on a poster and a hook for two more films.