Parents' Guide to Marauders

In spite of its cliches in character and plot twists, of which there are many, Marauders is still an engaging action movie. This is primarily due to Christopher Meloni's performance as the proverbial "cynical and world-weary" FBI Special Agent in charge of stopping a squad of violent and heavily-armed bank thieves. It's almost like he's enjoying the opportunity to use so much profanity after years of being denied the privilege on Law & Order. There's an exuberance to what he brings to what could've easily been a stock character. As one of the agents working under Meloni's character, Dave Bautista also brings more to a character that's neither original nor requiring all that much effort beyond verbally hazing the new FBI agent on the team and making puns about sexual organs that even Beavis and Butthead would find incredibly dumb. That leaves Bruce Willis, whose portrayal of a corrupt bank president comes across as listless, flat, and uninspired.

The story itself becomes almost impossibly tangled, with threads that seem unresolved, and side stories that feel shoehorned in simply to give these abrasive protagonists a "human" side to justify their behaviors. The big "reveal" of the plot-twist isn't bad, even if, by the time it's revealed, we're more interested in stopping other bad guys. Most of it doesn't seem all that believable, but that's never stopped other contributions to the action movie genre, so there's no reason for Marauders to break this mold. There's action, there's some mystery as to who are the bad people behind the robberies, and, when not discussing the work of H.P. Lovecraft (and of course this is relevant to the mysteries in the movie) with Bruce Willis' character, Christopher Meloni curses like crazy.