In the numerous collaborations between director Isaac Florentine and
Scott Adkins, Close Range is not of high caliber. The film opens with
Scott rescuing his nice from a cartel in Mexico. The pairs come back to her
home ranch in the US. Obviously baddies follow, apparently to get a USB
drive loaded with a bunch of financial accounts that Scott happened to
grab. Message to self: do not put all your eggs in one proverbial USB
basket. Along the way there's a deadbeat dad who got his family into
this trouble and a corrupt cop beholden to the cartel. That's pretty
much the whole story. While Florentine and Scott certainly know
hand-to-hand combat, there's not much story or scenery to get jazzed
about. Everything revolves around the ranch house and Scott
fending off generic cartel dudes. I longed for some generic
Euro-baddies or at or Southeast Asian scenery, the go to obligations for
low-budget action films. Something could have saved us poor viewers
from this brown landscape. Anyways, Scott mostly punches and pops the
baddies, though without any formidable opposition talent, at least on
the martial-arts front, this one is a snore. Had to watch this over 4
sittings to even make it through, then with all the commercials on the
Roku channel, it was a slog. Scott wears a black leather jacket the
whole film. Not many people can pull of this kind of jacket. Thank the
world, we have Scott but even he can't save Close Range.
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