From the Inexplicably in the Netflix Top 10 Dept. is 10 Minutes Gone, a 2019 action-crime-thriller “starring” Bruce Willis, but actually starring Michael Chiklis. Of course you know that large swaths of Willis’ relatively recent films are direct-to-video/streaming/obscurity rent-an-aging-action-star action-crime-thrillers; you surely also know that he was diagnosed with aphasia, a neurological disorder, and announced his retirement in 2022, a year in which his name is on 11 similar projects (with two more coming in 2023 – he must have stacked up a lot of these movies before calling it quits). I’ve seen a few of these Tangentially Willis Movies, and the question for this one is, can we tell it apart from any of the others? I have my doubts.
The Gist: A crew sips whisky and maps out a plan to run into a bank with guns and masks and take something that isn’t theirs and then leave very quickly. Frank (Chiklis), dubbed the Best Lock Man Outside of New York, and his brudda Joe (Tyler Jon Olson) head up this mug – they’ll go in the back and attach a beeping thing to the big safe and twirl the knob until it opens while Mitchell (John Hickman), Griffin (Kyle Schmid) and Baxter (Swen Temmel) point guns at security guards and yell at the tellers to keep their faces down. Easy. In and out. Routine bad-guy stuff you see in every movie. Unless it all goes to shit, which tends to be something that happens in a lot of movies. In fact, if it doesn’t all go to shit, the movie might not have a reason to exist at all. However! What if it didn’t all go to shit? Would we be pleasantly surprised? If a direct-to-video/streaming/obscurity rent-an-aging-action-star action-crime-thriller was about a heist that went according to plan and didn’t result in overtime for the coroner, and our anti-hero protagonists took their dough to an obscure Mexican beach and retired? If the movie was about how they retired and learned how to knit and play the glockenspiel? It might end up being Oscar bait.
Alas, no knitting. It all goes to shit. The cops show up earlier than expected. People die when bullets are fired into their bodies in sensitive areas. Frank and Joe manage to acquire the booty – a metal box full of diamonds – and head out the back door to enact Escape Plan B, until they get walloped from behind. Frank wakes up with a headache. Joe is far worse off – he died when someone fired bullets into his body in sensitive areas. Their boss in a room high up in a building, Rex (Willis), ain’t happy about this turn of events. He yells at a wholly superfluous character (Texas Battle) who exists to exchange exposition with him. Then he sends his cleaner, Ivory (Lydia Hull), to stalk around like the Terminatress, coolly making people die by firing bullets into peoples’ bodies in sensitive areas, and also exploding things and walking away from the exploding things, coolly, unfazed by the exploding things.
So. What went wrong? There musta been a rat, Frank concludes, and he’s being set up as the patsy. He grabs Joe’s girlfriend Claire (Meadow Williams) so she doesn’t end up dying by bullets fired into etc. etc. They track down the three other guys on the job so they can shoot first and then discuss whether one or the other was the rat. This involves many exchanges of hardboiled dialogue (“It was all clear til it all went postal,” “Why you f—in’ with my sunny disposition, Frank,” stuff like that) and reiterations of the heist from their point of view, which is when the plot gets ever-so-slightly Rashomon’d (until the third guy, where they just give up on rehashing the same shootout sequence from a couple different angles). Frank’s quest doesn’t go particularly well, especially for the many people who get killed. Will this end with a big whopper of a twist or what?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Comparisons to Kurosawa, Heat or The Bank Job seem overly generous. But otherwise, 10 Minutes Gone is such a frustratingly redundant B-minus-grade action-thriller genre exercise, it brings to mind specifically nothing. So let’s just say it has 1.73 Heat-inspired shots and move on.
Performance Worth Watching: Hull’s portrayal of a cold-blooded killer is so campy, you half expect her to laugh and break character like she’s Fallon in an SNL skit.
Memorable Dialogue: “None of us would be here today if we didn’t believe in honor among thieves,” says Rex, setting up the great irony of the film, which is explosive in the sense that it’s so ham-fistedly obvious, it’s akin to headbutting a landmine.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: There’s an entire Hollywood industrial complex that churns out junk like 10 Minutes Gone: Small budget. Production locations in states with tax incentives. Often produced by sketchmeister Randall Emmett. Casts culled from a stable of B-movie cogs (Olson, Hull, Williams, Temmel and others turn up often in these things). A quasi-headliners like Willis (or Mel Gibson or Robert De Niro or Thomas Jane), flown in to shoot a handful of quickie scenes – often talky and uncomplicated and therefore far from the action – in just-gettin’-through-it paycheck-cashing style. And for reasons inexplicable – besides extreme boredom, epidemics of bad taste and/or mass hypnosis – these movies sometimes end up in Netflix’s Top 10.
Now, if there was something winkingly camp about 10 Minutes Gone, it might be modestly viable entertainment. But it takes itself just seriously enough to render it flavorless mush, with a bland mosaic of faceless characters reciting boring dialogue and occasionally shooting at each other during vaguely comprehensible action sequences with lotsa edits and prominent shaky cam. There’s always a gratuitous body count and a scene riddled with egregious LENS FLARE so at least one among the plethora of cliches being deployed is self-consciously “artsy.” If you watch it, be prepared to forget it almost instantly.
Our Call: SKIP IT. 10 Minutes Gone is so generic, it should come in a black-and-white box reading “Heist-Gone-Wrong Movie.”
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.