Detective Knight: Redemption

By now we all know the situation. Bruce Willis is in bad health and struggling with early onset dementia. These direct to streaming films are built around him. Rarely has it been more obvious than here. Entire scenes go without him saying a word and the other actors exposition dumping what should have been his dialogue.

While the first Detective Knight film built up a semi interesting villain and a decent motivation for Willis, this one is almost incoherent. The criminal from the first movie is back, and we're supposed to root for him, but his character makes one dumb decision after the next, and for a protagonist, he's not proactive enough.

Willis is barely in it. His former partner is in a wheel chair and all of his scenes should have been Willis's, but they needed someone who can remember their lines.

One major flaw is the film's villain. After a very strong opening scene which actually had me hyped, the villain turns into a cliché crazy preacher guy who wants to topple the system. Seen and heard it all before. As the film goes on, he becomes more and more ridiculous, and so does the motivation of others to follow him. The actor does his best with the role, but it's very badly written. He's the only actor who really puts in an effort. Everyone else sleepwalks through their roles.

The ambient score is effective at first but gets on your nerves after a while, as does the terrible color grading. The movie is way too dark and saturated. The shot blocking isn't bad, but for some reason they decide to shine red and green lights on the actors nonstop. The finale then gets AvP Requiem bad in terms of color grading. It's so dark you can barely make out what's what.

I will say that the opening scene and some of the bank robberies are quite intense, and the chanting is quite effective at building tension.

A pity. If you're looking for one of Bruce's last films, watch Paradise City, which was actually pretty decent.

Now, I haven't seen the 2022 movie "Detective Knight: Rogue", so I don't know what I missed out on here. But I have to say that the 2022 "Detective Knight: Redemption" felt like a stand-alone movie, so I guess it wasn't wholly and fully necessary to have seen the other movie first.

When I sat down to watch "Detective Knight: Redemption", I have to say that I wasn't exactly harboring a lot of expectations to the movie, since the endless stream of Bruce Willis movies these past few years have been dubious at best.

But still, since I hadn't already seen "Detective Knight: Redemption", and had the chance to do so, of course I did.

I will say that writers Edward Drake and Corey Lange put together a fair enough script and storyline for the movie. It was actually much better than I had initially feared it to be, so it was an enjoyable action thriller. Sure, this wasn't top of the line, but it proved to be enjoyable and entertaining, and isn't that what movies are all about?

It wasn't because of Bruce Willis that the movie turned out good, because he wasn't on the screen for that long really. Nay, the movie was made watchable by Paul Johansson (playing Ricky Conlan). He really carried the movie quite well.

There is a good amount of action in the movie, and that definitely helped to keep the movie afloat.

The special effects, and by that I mean the blood spray when bullets hit people, was just laughably bad. Amazing how such horrible CGI can get green-lighted.

All in all, then director Edward Drake put together a watchable movie. Not that it is a movie that I will ever return to again, but it provided enough entertainment for a single viewing.

My rating of "Detective Knight: Redemption" lands on a five out of ten stars.

Script seems written by someone who has never written a movie script before in their life. Nothing is appealing or entertaining at all in this repellant waste of EVERYONE'S time. It's not Bruce's fault. His scenes could have been performed by an automaton. The 'effects' even suck, from the first gun shot, where the victim's blood squirt happens BEFORE the trigger is pulled. Music must have been free. It's ultra -generic and utterly blows. And the whole premise of the movie was a stupid idea to begin with. Shame on EVERYONE involved with the 'making' of this embarrassment, except Bruce, who I feel sorry for.

It's shocking how a writer and director gets worse instead of better with every film they make. Every time I see BondIt Media Capital having funded a film (all of Edward Drake's flops), I question if BondIt is simply a money laundering front, because there's no way they're making money on all these failed films, and they seem to keep funding every flop film ever made - usually nothing better than a 3/10 rating. Once again, Drake's writing was atrocious, with convoluted and incoherent scenes and dialogue. Literally, there are scenes when various characters blab on and on about nothing. Then there's Drake's directing 90's slow-mo scenes, with faded and blurred flashbacks, that although I saw the first film, still made no sense why those scenes were needed, as they were just meaningless, random events from the first film. As usual, he also failed to direct his cast effectively, as Willis looked barely awake, and Paul Johansson was just too overbearing like he was on speed the entire runtime. I can't believe there's a third and thankfully final film of this trilogy.

I can only assume that before his announcement that he was retiring from the film industry, (Bruce) Willis must have worked overtime to churn out a lot of films before hanging up his guns etc. I didn't immediately notice the following (but it dropped everything into place with the styling of the films unfurling) that the script parts for Bruce were kept very limited -and short- which, would assist greatly in his ability to remember his lines etc; his debilitating sickness makes it hard for him in this subject matter.. As a prequel to the first film its a no go in that it is boringly tame and nothing of value to make it an unforgettable film.

If you saw part 1 then watch this part2 to complete your interest!