ACTS OF VIOLENCE

2018 | DIRECTOR. BRETT DONOWHO | REVIEW BY SHAUN CRAWFORD.

Bruce Willis continues his battering of the straight-to-dvd market with ACTS OF VIOLENCE, a grimy, sleazy pulp thriller with more than a shade of TAKEN in its story, but as is his M.O. of late, his time spent on set seems to be equivalent to an extended lunch-break from another film he cares more about.

Here he plays Detective James Avery, the hard-nosed investigator of an organised, nation-wide ring of sex traffickers.

When a young bride-to-be (Melissa Bolona) is abducted on her hens-night celebration, the bride-groom (Ashton Holmes), and his two brothers (Cole Hauser and Shawn Ashmore), former marines, wage war on the traffickers to get her back.

​Hauser is no stranger to gun-play and does fine as the battle-scarred soldier looking for a war to wage but Willis is a disappointment, having an obvious double fill in for the shots where he couldn’t be toshed showing up on set.

If AoV does anything right it doesn’t rush the character stuff in the set-up even if it doesn’t give the same graces to the originality quota. Sure, we’ve seen it all before and it’s largely telegraphed but the effort doesn’t go unnoticed and nobody can say It isn’t tight. At a brief 85-minutes it rockets along with little time for diversion - or nuance - and for the most part it’s serviceable for what it is but it’s not a date film and it ain’t gonna make anybodies top 10 list.
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