The Gateway V.F.

Another one of these low budget, small scale thrillers that fails to do much with a half-hearted premise. This one has a lot of characters but is in the main based around a father being released from jail and bringing crime into the life of his wife and daughter. As usual for this genre, they amass some top actors in support including Keith David and Bruce Dern, and Shea Whigham is reliably great. But it's very hard to get too excited about something so run of the mill.

What the Getaway has going for it is that it was a drama with these little bits of action in it. That was perfect for people like me who may not have been up for the drama and the action was on point.

I saw Frank Grillo is in it and that was a bonus. Grillo seems to be becoming that type of star power that can show up in three or four scenes in a movie and legitimately sell the movie by putting him on the poster.

Olivia Munn is in it too. Looks like she's trying something different to widen her acting skills. She's in luck getting to share the screen with a season actor like Bruce Dern.

But the most interesting and fascinating cast member was Shea Whigham. This is a man who spent most of his career as a supporting actor now stepping up to the plate as lead actor, and doing a bang up job with it.

The drama is grimm but well played, and the action was fast and effective. I thought this movie was perfect.

When a social worker gets a little too wrapped up in his client and her dirtbag ex-con hubby comes home, things explode. It's got that made-for-tv feel.

I had never heard about the 2021 thriller "The Gateway" from writers Alex Felix Bendaña, Andrew Levitas and Michele Civetta prior to sitting down and watching it here in 2022. All I knew about it was the fact that the movie Olivia Munn and Frank Grillo on the cast list.

The storyline was actually enjoyable. Sure, it wasn't the most innovative or creative of plot concepts, but the storyline made for good entertainment, and that is what matters to me when I sit down and watch a movie. So the writers definitely put together something that worked here in "The Gateway".

The narrative was adequately paced, some slow moments and some fast moments throughout the course of the movie, so it was a pretty nice enough movie experience.

"The Gateway" does have a good cast ensemble. I am not overly familiar with Shea Whigham, but he did perform quite well in this movie, despite of having just a single grimace to put on in every single scene. So there was lacking a bit of facial expressions of emotions and such, but it seemed okay to the character, given the backstory and addiction to alcohol. Olivia Munn was definitely nicely cast and performed quite well, and it was nice to see Bruce Dern in the movie. It was a shame that Frank Grillo only had a small role in the movie, as he could have spruced it up quite a lot. Zach Avery definitely put on a noteworthy performance here.

All in all then "The Gateway" was a good movie. I was definitely entertained by it.

My rating of director Michele Civetta's 2021 movie "The Gateway" lands on a six out of ten stars.

B movie, mediocre even by network tv standards, with an A list group of actors, maybe drawn to this project by its truly noble attempt to protect children from the idiotic behavior of the adults around them.

But, ends up Jjust a predictable, excruciatingly slow paced film.....We see all the punches coming way too far in advance; like a spiraling, slow motion plane crash....