Detective Knight: Rogue

I used to be a big fan of Bruce Willis, but most of the movies outside the Die Hard franchise except for the fifth element and the red series, were not particularly interesting. This movie is probably one of the worst. I lasted through about twenty minutes then boredom won out. It starts out strong with a thwarted armored car heist, but goes downhill from there. I will not comment on Bruce Willis acting in this as I know he is ill. I do wish him well. The other actors are wooden and lack any nuance to their performance. The script is very week. The movie totally fails to draw in the viewer, I was being overly generous when I gave it a 2.

This movie is the first part of a trilogy of action movies featuring Bruce Willis, who has unfortunately retired from show business due to some kind of dementia.

From the very first second, this movie wants to be an action thriller from the "good old days" and really doesn't leave out any clichés. Cool sayings, an ageing cop who loves working alone and nasty villains. Edward Drake tries to give the latter in particular a little more depth in his film, but doesn't get past the usual clichés. A pity, really. And unfortunately, these words can also be used to describe the entire movie.

The actors really try to make the best of the thin script, but it's so badly written that most of the dialog sounds like it was written by an AI.

L. A. police detective James Knight (Bruce Willis) and his partner track down four masked armed robbers and a gunfight ensues. His partner is heavily wounded and Knight vows to track down the perpetrators. The group is led by Casey Rhodes (Beau Mirchoff), a former star quarterback who lost everything in a point shaving scandal. They are backed by bookie gangster Winna (Michael Eklund) who has a corrupt past connection with Knight.

Bruce is a step slow and more robotic. It shows in the first shootout scene. He barely is able to get down. With his illness, I was surprised that he actually attempted an action scene. During the last act, they actually put a mask on his character so a stuntman could do his work. They tried very hard to cover for him. In fact, he's only the Lead in Name Only (LINO). The lead is really Beau Mirchoff. I like him and I like his character. He has depth. He's great. The situation with Bruce is obvious and distracting.

A gang of criminals stick up an armoured truck in LA. It leads to a shootout with some cops. This includes Detective James Knight (Bruce Willi) and his partner Fitzgerald (Lochlyn Munro.) The latter is badly wounded.

Now partnered with ex CIA operative now turned detective Sango (Jimmy Jean-Louis.) They arrive in New York to follow a lead regarding phantom chartered flights.

On their radar is a crooked bookie Winna who also uses ex athletes fallen on hard times for his robberies. One of them is ex pro footballer Casey Rhodes who was one of the gang members involved in the LA heist.

This is an inferior version of Heat. There are lots of location shooting involving guns. The story is dumb. You have scenes where LA cops hang their cop badges around their necks interrogating people in New York where they have no jurisdiction.

The film wants to give a psychological edge by focussing on some of the characters such as Rhodes who turned to crime to provide for his family.

The plot is not very fluid. There is a concentration on other characters as the nominal lead actor was too ill to be in many of the scenes. There is once scene near the end of the film where Willis is replaced by a stuntman with an animal mask on.

It almost feels like some sort of abuse allowing this to happen and be pushed out. He's visibly not fully cognizant and only has about one line of dialogue, or partial line per scene. The movie despite being low budget or straight to video quality isnt even the issue. Bruce cannot or does not have any actual conversations outside of what feels like broken recorded and put together lines. He even looks aloof in the scenes shot, as if he wandered onto set while filming happened, they saw him and added his name to credits. Its sad. Movie/Story aren't awful but it feels broken to say the least, it hurts to see this happen. Especially onscreen.