THE FINAL RUN - Mark Reviews Movies

The Final Run, Level 33 Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 14, 2025

Some opening text claims that The Final Run is based on Operation Jackpot, in which the so-called War on Drugs targeted and stopped a large group of marijuana smugglers in the American South during the 1980s. Walter Czura and Jason Usry's screenplay isn't technically that story, but it imagines what life in modern times might be like for one of the "gentlemen smugglers" who were arrested and convicted. Actually, it's not even that story, since it does just become the tale of yet another drug-smuggling operation.

The former and soon-to-be revived smuggler is a man named Pierce Butler (Jeff Fahey), who was incarcerated for nine years after his conviction and has since turned to a law-abiding life of shrimping. Times are tough, though, with shrimp migrating farther south off the coast of Florida. In normal times, Pierce could handle expenses for himself and his family, namely his wife Julia (Dorothy Hadley Joly) and their orphaned granddaughter Ella (Maddie Henderson), who lives with her grandparents and is now making her way through law school. He does, after all, have some of that smuggling cash buried in a cooler somewhere on his property if worse comes to worse.

It does. Julia's doctor calls one night to inform Pierce that his wife's cancer is not being stopped by current treatment options. There's an experimental drug she could try, but the cost is more than they have or could raise quickly enough. Plus, the local bank was recently purchased by a larger one, which wants to foreclose on property from any outstanding loans. The family's property and Pierce's boat are on the bank's list, so he has even less time to pay off that debt.

What's most surprising, perhaps, is how transparent these motives for Pierce to return to smuggling turn out to be. Julia gets one heart-to-heart with her husband about being at peace if they can't afford the treatment, and from there, the character is promptly forgotten by the script. There's no resolution of any kind for Julia—not even the suggestion of her fate once the plot reaches its inevitable end. She is nothing more than a plot device, basically portrayed as the narrative equivalent of the house and the boat, to set things in motion.

That, of course, is Pierce's decision to call his old drug contacts and arrange another shipment of marijuana from Colombia to the United States. Ella becomes involved, because she's worried about her grandmother—but barely speaks to or even about her again. Since she knows the law, she can handle herself against a pair of DEA agents combing the nearby waters in an early scene, and because she plays chess with her grandfather every so often, she's an expert strategist, too.

It's not, apparently, as if much strategy is required here. The smugglers, for example, plan to get help from local priest Sol (Jim Gooden), an old friend of Pierce who helped him back in the day to return some vaguely established favor. He'll go on the radio and say the weather's fine, if it's safe for the boat with the drugs to return, or not good, if it's not safe. With that kind of elaborate and impossible-to-break code, the DEA agents are obviously helpless against the smugglers.

Thankfully for Pierce and Ella, the agents we meet are pretty incompetent. The main one is Davis (Drew Waters), who is, quite conveniently for there to be some kind of conflict, dating Pierce's daughter Alex (Katie Amess), a local prosecutor. Davis spends so much of the movie wondering if his girlfriend's father might be involved in drug smuggling that he doesn't seem to bother to do much investigation into that pertinent question.

There is, of course, a lingering idea that the screenplay and director Chris Helton mostly avoid. That's the change in policy and public sentiment about marijuana in the decades between the '80s and now, and the closest it comes to addressing or acknowledging that, if indirectly, is the presence of retired DEA agent Sam Sloane (Judd Nelson), who was behind the bust that put Pierce in prison. Weirdly, the character exists both to do some off-the-books investigation into his old adversary and to want to put their shared past behind them. Learning that Julia is sick is something of a turning point for the man, perhaps, but that brings us right back the issue of her character existing for no other reason than to push the story forward.

Most of this, then, becomes a string of dull and repetitive scenes of characters explaining what they plan or want to do, as opposed to actually doing them. Whatever stakes and possible complexities might exist in the plot of The Final Run are bypassed for a simplistic, shallow approach.

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