Parents' Guide to

Assault on VA-33

By Brian Costello, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

Violence, cursing in dreadful, uninspired action movie.

Movie R 2021 90 minutes
Assault on VA-33 Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

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age 16+

Based on 1 parent review

Rabbit1526
Rabbit1526 Adult
April 20, 2021
age 16+

Falls flat

a low budget mash-up of Die Hard and Assault on Precinct 13
See all 1 parent review

What's the Story?

In ASSAULT ON VA-33, Jason Hill (Sean Patrick Flanery) is a veteran living in Buffalo who struggles with PTSD. After his session at the VA hospital, he has plans to get lunch with his therapist wife and teen daughter, but his wife must cancel when the hospital has a top-secret high-ranking official coming in for a session: the general of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Hill leaves, he begins to notice suspicious behavior -- a new security guard, suspicious elevator repairmen, staff wearing IDs that aren't theirs. He calls the police department, but the chief (Michael Jai White) dismisses Hill as a mentally unstable veteran with paranoid delusions. However, Hill's suspicions prove to be correct, as he soon discovers that a group of terrorists have taken the building hostage. The hostages are led by a Ukranian terrorist named Adrian Rybakov, who demands $50 million and safe passage out of the country. Since the police don't believe him and the FBI hasn't yet arrived, it's up to Hill to take out the terrorists one at a time, and save the general, his wife and daughter, and everyone else who has been taken hostage.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: (1):
Kids say: Not yet rated

This movie has awful dialogue, excruciating attempts at humor, and cliched action. Assault on VA-33 is a mindless action movie that does, admittedly, derive some entertainment value out of unintentional hilarity. International terrorists, led by, of course, a guy with a slicked-back ponytail and bad Boris Badonov accent, take over a Veterans Administration hospital outside of Buffalo, New York, and it's up to our hero, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, to stop them by picking them off one by one and by any means necessary, be it through punches, kicks, knives, guns, assault weapons. The villains are killed off in order of their relevance to the story, and, making this even more like a horror movie, there's even a police chief who refuses to believe that anything amiss is happening until it's almost too late.

It's a low-budget movie -- there's a flashback scene in which Flanery's character is a soldier with his troops who seem to be fighting not in some foreign locale but an abandoned Rust Belt warehouse -- but that could be overlooked if there was anything fresh or redeeming about this. The violence is constant, with plenty of hostages and terrorists shot and killed in the head at point-blank range. While no one necessarily expects action movies like these to be masterpieces of cinema, there's at least a hope that they won't be so paint-by-numbers, like so many action movies done so many times before. This movie never does anything new or different or exciting, not even once. It's an uninspired action movie that tries and fails to make up for this lack of inspiration by throwing in as much gratuitous violence and profanity as possible.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about action movie violence. How does the violence in this movie compare to other action movies you've seen?

  • Did you think the violence here was necessary to the story? Why or why not?

  • Did the profanity add a sense of authenticity to the dialogue, or did it seem cliched and unnecessary? Why?

Movie Details

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