The Hard Way

(2019) The Hard Way ACTION THRILLER

I do not hate or loathe this movie as many of the users here since I thought the fight scenes are nicely done and to top it off it does have a happy ending. It's production value is better than many of the current low budget movies Jean Claude Van Damme as of late and Steven Seagal movies.

Co-written and directed by Keoni Waxman that has former Ops guy and NY bar owner, John Payne (Michael Jai White) finds out his brother, Cody Payne (Grant Campbell) killed while on duty while he and his partner, Mason Bellows (Luke Goss) were pursuing a criminal syndicate operating on the streets of Bucharest, Romania.

Starts off with MJWs brother cody on a mission in which he is killed. No big deal you wont miss him. Credits end and were introduced to our star MJW who in all honesty is still his regular old charming self. Some real bad mob actors try to shake him down just to get their asses beat now heres where everything goes wrong.....MJW going on a mission to avenge his brother. This movie would have been much better if it just was about the mafia and his bar which honestly has a decent back story. They could have explored that more and could have set up plenty of more action scenes with various mafia members. In the end this movie would have benefited from sticking to what feels like the original idea.

My wife and I enjoyed it. I was entertained and that is all that matters. If there was bad acting I did not see it. Yes there are a thousand movies with the same story line. But all movies are the same, different time, different places, different actors. Also seems to me that a lot of reviewers have very negative attitudes to everything. I find within ten minutes of watching a film I can tell if is going to entertain me, and I turn it off if it does not. Why sit through a movie if you do not like it and then criticise it. Strange.

Three or four of the lead actors, the cinematography, and the majority of the fight choreography were positives. Michael Jai White and Madalina Anea were very good, and even George Remes over-the-top psycho was pretty well acted. Luke Goss, though, is a quality actor, who rose above the muck he was given to turn in a really good performance.

The biggest downfall of the film, besides Randy Couture's to-be-expected woeful acting, and the absolutely atrocious 'acting' performances of everyone else in the entire movie not mentioned already, was the script. It was beyond terrible.

One example - a completely unnecessary and ham-fisted attempt to divulge backstory, in an attempt to force the audience to care about a barmaid, delivered by a terrible actress, was so bad it, just, stayed bad. Not one piece of dialogue seemed to fit, and when you give bad dialogue to bad actors, it's not going to turn out well. One of the worst scripts I've seen filmed.

The setup for a sequel was obvious. White and Goss could definitely make a really good movie together, and these characters themselves would be fine. But a better director and an actual script would really help next time.

To sum up, "The Hard Way" is a B movie actioner that will fail to give you much excitement, and you'll quickly and completely forget about it after a few days of watching it. The fault with the movie does not lie with its star Michael Jai White - he is as charismatic as ever, and he does put in a lot of effort with his performance and in fight sequences. Instead, the fault lies with the movie writer and director, Keoni Waxman. The script is very familiar, so there are absolutely no surprises, even with the so-called "surprise twist" near the end of the movie. As for Waxman's direction, though he occasionally generates a little heat with the action sequences (though more often than not they are kind of choppy), his direction is often pretentious (what's with the black and white moments and the freeze frame moments?), poorly photographed, makes the Romanian backdrop look like it was filmed in Montreal, and sluggishly and leisurely paced. Though the end results are a little better than the terrible direct to video Steven Seagal movies he cranked out in the past, one will still question why Waxman still is in business after all these years. He has to learn the hard way that he simply can't cut it as a filmmaker.