Detective Knight - La notte del giudizio

Whoever gave the green light to make this film, should be ashamed. Bruce Willis clearly for the past few years, even before his condition was made public, no longer had the competency to act. Yet studios still sign him to make these cheap DTV films to capitalize on his fame and make a few dollars.

Detective Knight's plot was entirely incoherent and uninteresting with no help from the bland characters. It was difficult watching any scene with Willis, as he can only mutter a few words and nod when spoken to. Unfortunately, due to his illness, his personality and charisma are gone. As a consequence, his supporting cast have to frequently say lines most likely meant for his character or respond in ways that hardly come across as an authentic conversation.

I cannot give any reasons as to why anyone should watch this film, even if you are a die-hard Bruce fan. His name is just being exploited here. Go rewatch him in his old glory, and avoid this at all costs.

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.

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.

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.

Having seen American Siege and now this movie both with Bruce Willis, it is clear that he just mails it in. He used to be entertaining but now is a complete waste of time.

The script is predictable and the acting wooden. Even the action scenes are poorly executed. Maybe they revived great tax breaks to film on location and show off the city

It is like Bruce just wants to have a few old friends around from movies he has made in the past. For example Trevor Gretzky is in his last two movies; is he a friend of Wayne?

If this is a trilogy I will simply avoid any more of Detective Knight and Mr Willis.