BLACKOUT (2022)

BLACKOUT (2022)

Tagline: Revenge Don't Care Much for the Law 

(Action, Crime, Who Woke Up Nick Nolte?) [R]

Note: This movie was not given an MPAA rating, but it would have been a [R] just due to the profanity alone.

How many 6 foot 3 Ken dolls just show up with bumps on their head within a 100-mile radius of Tucson, south or north of the border…?

In this one, a man named Cain wakes up in the hospital after not being with Anna (who says she is his wife) for days. It doesn’t take long before he violently tries to leave the hospital which is guarded by the Cartel. The only good news for Cain is that they can’t kill him, because they need what’s inside his head. Not like zombies need what’s inside your head, but “information”.  

My first exposure to Josh Duhamel was back in 2007 in TRANSFORMERS. He is solid as Cain in this and kicks a lot of heads in. This movie and some of the other things he’s been in, kind of highlight that he was terribly under-utilized in the TRANSFORMERS series altogether, but then again, no human was going to get to shine completely in those movies. This movie also has Abbie Cornish, another wildly underrated talent who just killed it in GEOSTORM a while back, but is probably best known for SUCKER PUNCH. Omar Chaparro is very solid as Eddie and we see him change his demeanor in a manner of second in several scenes. The rest of the cast is also very good for what this movie is. 

The style director Sam Macaroni uses is pretty interesting and I don’t know if I would really say it’s good or bad, it’s just different. He is mostly known for shorts, and I will say that some of the scenes are pretty smooth, but others are choppy like whoever had the camera was on their 17th cup of coffee or something. I usually can’t stand slow-motion anything, but Macaroni does a solid job on that front. There are also several sequences that seem like they just didn’t know what to do with Anna, so they keep sticking her in rooms that Cain comes back to later for like half an hour. 

Fair warning, this thing is almost non-stop action and it’s extremely brutal. So if you are looking for a typical tame crime thriller with tons of guns but not much blood, this won’t be for you. One thing I like and don’t like about this movie is that it takes place in Arizona. I am sure there is a bunch of shady stuff going on here though largely due to weak politicians and a lack of anyone genuinely caring about properly vetting candidates and on and on and on. Enough with all of that.

I really don’t understand what people disliked about this one. It’s like a humorless DIE HARD on crack in a hospital. If I am going to venture a guess it’s that it was made by Patriot Pictures and mentions that there are puppeteers controlling the government and all of that stuff? I have no idea. If anything I don’t understand why Anna is so grumpy with Cain for most of this flick, but it is what it is. I guess if you work for certain organizations you are supposed to be grumpy all the time. I do think a few more plot points would have gone a long way because as it is, it kind of seems like we need a second movie to clarify some things. 

Out of 2022’s batch of b-movie action flicks, this one I found pretty intriguing and far from bad. I give this one a 4 out of 7. It could have been a 5 if they had tied up a few loose ends.

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