Proud Mary

This action film's lack of originality and cleverness is made worse by a self-defeating visual style and overuse of music. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but the main character is an ace killer who wants out of the biz after bonding with a kid. Her bosses "love" her but won't let her go. Unfortunately, Mary's sudden emergence of a conscience is unconvincing, considering her continued mass murders. Might not those men also have families? Mary has killed untold numbers of people, but once in a while seems squeamish. Odd. The folks behind Proud Mary seem to have decided against character development, so there's nothing to distinguish one person from another in terms of their behavior. In other words, there's nothing to identify Mary as "proud" other than the inevitable misuse of the song during a shoot-out. The dialogue is flat and predictable, and the action scenes are uninterestingly executed, with no tension or wow factor.

All this is compounded by hyperactive editing that seems flat-out inappropriate in most scenes, especially the quieter ones. All the excessive cutting prevents the scenes from having any flow. It actually makes the film hard to watch at times -- not because of the speed of the edits, but because it feels like someone keeps rhythmically hitting the "previous channel" key on a remote control. Likewise, the music is egregiously overused; much of the film is underscored as if to indicate a moment of heartbreaking revelation. And then there's the fact that the many, many gunfights seem to depend on the bad guys having terribly poor aim. Only Brown, as Mary's ex and the mob boss's son, makes an impact. But otherwise, Proud Mary is a style-less exercise that wastes some talent.