Mark Reviews Movies: BLOWBACK

Blowback, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 16, 2022

Written by a team of four, the screenplay for Blowback entirely consists of plot and little to nothing else. It features a MacGuffin and people who want it, to be sure, but calling them characters would be far too generous. Referring to them as archetypes would be a stretch, too.

The closest director Tibor Takács movie comes to some kind of human element arrives at the start (well, after a mostly useless fast-forward to a story point a bit down the line), as Nick (Cam Gigandet) visits his teenage daughter (played by Melissa Diaz) in the hospital. She's sick, and her only chance for survival is experimental treatment. That element of Nick's motive feels so disconnected from everything else that one wonders if the filmmakers didn't fit it in later, as a way to have at least one semi-sympathetic character in this.

Nick, a rideshare driver, doesn't have that kind of cash. He does, though, know someone at a bank, who knows about a delivery of something incredibly valuable.

Re-connecting with old flame Veronica (Michele Plaia), Nick makes a connection to her boyfriend/her gym's main financial investor Jack (Randy Couture), a crime boss of some sort who makes further connections for Nick to a team of thieves. The robbery goes mostly as planned, but in the aftermath, Jack's guys shoot Nick, leave him for dead, and steal the stolen briefcase containing hard drives with millions of dollars of cryptocurrency on them.

The rest of this has Nick looking for the briefcase and revenge on the thieves who wronged him. Meanwhile, some cops and/or federal agents (It's unimportant, since they only exist to keep things moving with some close calls and chases, but also inconsistent within the movie) are always—and, considering how often they just miss out on something, amusingly—one step behind the resulting torture and death.

Because his hands have to relatively clean for that minimal level of sympathy to remain, Nick is always one step removed from doing any of those things. One guy has a heart attack while our protagonist is interrogating him, and after enlisting help from the mobster who owns that case in order to re-steal it (a somewhat clever, if wholly unbelievable, touch), Nick stands by while one of the gangster's goons rips off another betrayer's toe. At a certain point, we have to realize there simply are no decent people in this movie (aside from the plot device of the daughter), even if the filmmakers themselves go out of their way to refuse accepting that fact.

Since the movie is all about it, the plot of Blowback does hold up to at least some level of scrutiny. Since there's little reason to care about anyone driving that plot, the level of scrutiny is admittedly negligible.

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