96 min | R | April 16, 2021 | Lionsgate
An assassin gets blackmailed into one last night of dirty work by a retired cop who holds her daughter hostage. She drives around a neon-soaked city collecting cash from drug dealers. The only thing the movie executes cleanly is itself.
Victoria is a former drug courier trying to leave the life behind and raise her daughter. Damon is a corrupt ex-cop in a wheelchair who needs money collected from criminals across the city. He takes the daughter hostage and sends Victoria out to do the rounds. The film wants to be a propulsive single-night thriller about a woman pushed past her limits. It is instead a series of disconnected errands strung together by a plot that never explains why any of it has to happen.
Ruby Rose plays Victoria with a fixed scowl and little else. The role asks her to carry the action, but the staging gives her nothing to play against. Morgan Freeman plays Damon from a wheelchair and a chair and rarely moves from either. He delivers his lines into a phone and a laptop while the camera holds on him in static medium shots. Freeman’s presence is the only gravity here, and the film parks him in a room and forgets to give him a scene.
George Gallo directs from a script he co-wrote with Samuel Bartlett, and the writing never establishes basic stakes or geography. The cinematography drowns every frame in blue and magenta gels until the action becomes hard to read. Faces vanish into shadow. Gunfights happen in murk where you cannot tell who is shooting whom. The editing cuts around the violence rather than through it, which drains the set pieces of any impact or clarity.
This is a thriller with no thrills and an action movie with no legible action. The premise could sustain a lean genre exercise, but the film cannot decide where its characters are or what they want. Freeman sits and talks. Rose drives and frowns. Nothing accumulates, and the night ends without anything having been at risk.