Jamie
Mary is a hitwoman working for the mob (with a heart of gold) who takes a young boy under her wing out of guilt for killing his family. A mob war breaks out as a result of her actions and things quickly spiral out of control as she attempts to leave the mob life. Will she be able to escape and keep Danny safe before it’s too late? Find out in… Proud Mary.
How?! Proud Mary is totally a hitwoman with a heart of gold. During one of her hits she realizes too late that her target has a young son, Danny, that she has made a orphan. Feeling guilty she begins to follow him around and try to keep him safe, but he ends up working for a rough mobster from a rival gang. When they begin to abuse Danny, Mary snaps, take the kid in and kills the mobster. This begins a mob war that puts everyone in danger and Mary has to try to cover up her own involvement in the hit. Meanwhile the other hitman in the mob, and her former flame, becomes suspicious when he starts to put the pieces together about where Danny came from. The mob boss also starts to take a shine to Danny and begins to groom him to be part of the family. Seeing her chance at escaping the mob world closing and Danny being sucked into it along with her, she makes one final dash for freedom. Unfortunately the mobsters are there first and take Danny as bait. You know what that means! Extended fight scene choreographed to music! Hooray. She indeed kills everyone to the bopping tunes of Proud Mary and everyone in the audience is bopping along too and is like “you know what, I actually kinda like this movie now that I have a sweet soundtrack to the merciless killings I’m witnessing.” They then escape and laugh about how many people they saw die. THE END.
Why?! The biggest question in the movie is Mary’s motivations. It becomes clear that Mary sees something of herself in Danny. She grew up on the street and Benny ended up taking her under his wing and training her as a hitwoman. Now she can’t ever escape. Clearly things were and are heading that way for Danny too and she wants to desperately keep that from happening.
Who?! I wonder what this film would be like if you inserted a Planchet into the middle of it. Just a chubby bumbling fool who just wants to do good by Benny but everyone shits on him. The movie’s already better. Also have to give a shout out to our boy Neal McDonough. *Italian chef kiss* Magnifique.
What?! I believe this film was fully financed as an extended commercial for Maserati… what’s that? It wasn’t? Could have fooled me. That’s because Mary’s Maserati had more character development than our primary antagonist Tom, the slab of meat hitman with a heart of shit. I actually felt more sadness when the car got all shot up and broken at the end than the five hundred people that were killed. But that car kept on trucking… solid Italian engineering.
Where?! Boston, baby. I was trying to find out what towns they filmed in and there were a bunch of articles claiming that the film was made in Boston, but is meant to be set in New York. Ha! Nope. This is Boston through and through, from the MA license plates, to the T rides, to Danny being from Jamaica Plain, and the real time baseball game they attended at Fenway Park (one of those may not be entirely true). B+.
When?! I didn’t espy anything that would indicate when this took place. I guess maybe the summer because Mary never seems particularly concerned or interested in getting Danny to go to school or do anything but sit in her apartment. Although I also feel like there were a lot of jackets… probably means that this is an F.
This movie is just not very good. For the first thirty minutes it was very expository in just trying to set up the story and felt either confusing or boring or both. Once it got past that, though, I liked the mob family dynamic and the two action scenes so it was fine… I guess the young actor was good. He had a little ‘tude (as the kids say)… that’s all I got. You know it isn’t a great BMT film when I can only gather a couple lackluster sentences about it. Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Every year we go through the worst of the worst of the year … and somehow every year we end up watching weirdo films that no one will remember in a year. Midnight Sun? Death Wish (2018)? Proud Mary? Ain’t nobody gonna have time to watch those in a year. I guess all the more reason to do them now. Let’s get into it!
P’s View on the Preview – Coming off of the small-feeling Midnight Sun I became somewhat hesitant about what appeared to be an equally small Proud Mary. Some bits of the preview suggested the film was a catastrophe, the IMDb rating in particular, but other bits made it seem just not as cool or fun as people wanted. I was hoping it was going to be a fun catastrophe because honestly … usually small bad films that aren’t are just boring.
The Good – The main character is good. The last third of the film gets its engine going and it just crazy enough to be a bit of fun. The film looks polished, even if the direction and writing often isn’t. All things considered remaking Gloria in this vein wasn’t a terrible idea, it was just not executed very well. It isn’t like Gloria is some amazing 80s masterpiece, and the remake feels like it has a point to make as well.
The Bad – The writing is terrible and the film does seem very small. The first third is pretty boring and kind of dumb. The actors besides the main character are either old and don’t seem to care (Danny Glover) or television actors or children and thus don’t really cut it, even for a film trying desperately to be an action film. The action at the end pushed it a bit too far into ludicrousness, not an inch of her car is not covered in a bullet hole and I’m supposed to believe she somehow survived? That’s probably the hardest bit to swallow, that even when they end up stumbling into an interesting bit it still feels like the director missed on how to make everything work.
You Just Got Schooled – Not much to really do here since I didn’t watch Gloria. I should have, but I didn’t. So I’ll just say that Proud Mary being both a song title and a movie title is not at all very rare. Which is surprising. Some of the examples are pushing it (like Ghostbusters, where the song is just the theme for the movie itself), but there are three bad movies which share the name of a song which are worse than Proud Mary by BMeTric. Deck the Halls (the Christmas film starring Matthew Broderick), My Girl 2, and Johnny Be Good (with Anthony Michael Hall). All three of those films are suppose to be terrible, and we’ve seen none of them. So at the moment Proud Mary is the worst film we’ve seen which shares its name with a song title! The more you know.
The BMT – Hmmmmmm. As I reflected on in the intro we do tend to end up watching kind of random films in this cycle for some reason. I don’t think this would make the cut when thinking back on 2018 in bad films in particular. I had had hopes, but unless the director hits it big, or some trend (like remaking 70s/80s films with predominantly black casts) becomes the next big thing, I don’t really see why Proud Mary would stand out for any reason whatsoever.
Welcome to Earf! – This is actually an easy one. Neal McDonough is in Proud Mary and Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li, which also stars Chris Klein, star of Here on Earth. Welcome to Earf!
StreetCreditReport.com – We have real lists now! From the AV Club, Variety, and Rolling Stone. You may or may not be surprised to learn that we actually haven’t seen many of the films on these lists. Part of that is because we are a bit more strict in our criteria than critics can be (Jurassic World 2 simply does not qualify), but mostly it is because a lot of these films are late summer, most are action films and thus can’t all be done in a cycle, and others are just too small to legitimize … but yeah, I wish these lists came out earlier because it would help a ton in getting a good cycle going.
Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 