Detective Knight: Redemption

"I'm gonna shove a Christmas tree up your ass and set it on fire"

Detective Knight: Redemption is directed by Edward Drake and stars Bruce Willis, Paul Johansson, Lochlyn Munro and Beau Mirchoff. My expectations were at ground level going into this since this is a sequel to Detective Knight: Rouge which in it of itself was not a good movie. Also now knowing everything we know about Bruce Willis (and considering this was one of the last movies he filmed before his retirement) I expected this to be dreadful to watch. Surprisingly to me it wasn't. This is kind of fun to watch in a guilty pleasure sort of way.

Detective Knight: Redemption isn't awful but it's not great either. The storyline here is way less convoluted than Rouge. It seems like everyone here for the most part was actually trying to make a competent movie. This is by far the best movie Edward Drake has directed (although if you look at his IMDB page that's not a hard accomplishment) Paul Johansson is easily the best part of this movie and he makes it work for the most part by cheesing it up to 11. It was also nice to see Lochlyn Munro have a bigger role here than the first even if he's stuck in a wheelchair. Bruce Willis disappears for long stretches of time here and he barley has any dialogue, his voice is dubbed in some spots and I don't think he shares a scene with most of the other actors in this movie. But that's to be expected at this point with the state he's in.

Towards the end of this movie it did put a smirk on my face to see Bruce Willis actually smiling and delivering witty dialogue. It was a quick and small glimpse of the charismatic movie star we all fell in love with in the first place.

Detective Knight: Independence is supposed to release in January. I hope the upward trend for this trilogy continues so the last thing on Willis' IMDB page doesn't have a 3.8 next to it.

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.

I have simply written a review because of the mindless idiots saying awful stuff about Bruce Willis who Cleary have no idea what they are on about.

If they were movie fans or indeed Bruce Willis fans Thet would know he is ill and this is why he is not in many scenes and looks confused disinterested or puzzled! It's because of his ongoing dementia.

Have a heart and do your research before being so horrible to a very talented actor who has simply tried the last few years but has now had to retire!

This guy gave us die hard twelve monkeys the fifth element and many more he is a legend and will be sorley missed in the movies!!

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.

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.