Entertaining old-school action
Summary
Gunner is a fun throwback to old-school action with an appealing lead in Luke Hemsworth; Mykel Shannon Jenkins and Morgan Freeman are also at their villainous best. It’s let down by awful musical choices during the action scenes and there is too much CG muzzle flare which ruins some of the set-pieces. This is still an entertaining Saturday night with a few beers movie, but there are other, far better ones you could watch instead.
Plot: Lee Gunner tries to save his sons, Luke and Travis, from a dangerous drug gang.
Review: I’m catching up on a few recent action movies that we haven’t covered yet now that my work has calmed down again. First up is Gunner from director Dimitri Logothetis (Jiu-Jitsu) and starring Luke Hemsworth as a war vet called Gunner who returns home to find out his small town isn’t what it once was. He and his sons stumble upon a drug lab while out camping and they are soon discovered; his two sons are kidnapped, so it’s up to Gunner to take out the trash and save his kids.
I’d heard many great things about this movie so maybe my expectations were a little too high, but I was hoping for more in the action department. Like most low budget movies today we get CG gunfire and despite a few real explosions there are some other animated ones. The parachuting scenes are unconvincing as well.
The biggest crime however, is the choice of music; this is one of those films where in pretty much every action scene it plays a song rather than using a score or no music at all. Occasionally it can work depending on the tune like in Guardians of the Galaxy, but in this case using songs takes out any sense of threat or stakes, so you never feel like Gunner or his kids are in any believable danger.
Hemsworth looks the part and makes for a potential new action star and it’s nice to see Undisputed 3’s Mykel Shannon Jenkins as the main villain, Dobbs. Morgan Freeman also shows up for some reason and elevates the material with his presence.
At times Gunner feels like a throwback to classic 80’s action and may not reinvent the genre, but it does what it sets out to do by being a straightforward and relatively entertaining picture. The pacing could have been a little tighter as I feel this story could have been told in 90 minutes, but I’m just nit-picking now.
There are some decent fight scenes and it’s great that an action film like this is still getting made; really, it just needed a bigger budget and different musical choices and it could have been awesome.
Overall, Gunner is a mostly enjoyable throwback to old-school action but the musical choices and unconvincing CG lets it down. Luke Hemsworth makes for a new potential action star and Mykel Shannon Jenkins and Morgan Freeman do their best to elevate the material.