ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE

US, 2017, 94 minutes, Colour.
Bruce Willis, John Goodman, Jason Momoa, Emily Robinson, Jessica Gomes, Famk3 Janssen, Thomas Middleditch.
Directed by Mark Cullen.

The title sounds good – but it is not Venice, Italy, but Venice, Los Angeles. Which means then that the characters and the situations, even with gangsters, are fairly laid-back.

This is one of the many films that Bruce Willis has made since losing his top action spot reputation. He rivals Nicolas Cage in the number of films made each year – very few of them top-notch. This one is definitely not top-notch. It may be famous for the fact that Bruce Willis does a sequence naked on a skateboard through the streets of Los Angeles!

The film certainly has the atmosphere of Venice Beach, including the beaches themselves. Bruce Willis plays a private detective who lectures skateboarders on their future but has not made much of his own future. He has a young assistant, Thomas Middleditch, who does some of his detective work for him, including tracking down the sister of the local gangster, played by Jason Momoa.

The plot is slight, an encounter with the gangsters, with Willis dressing up as a pizza delivery man, taking a car, crashing it and delivering it back to its bewildered owner. He looks after his sister’s dog, to whom his niece is devoted – and their being robbed, the gangster having the dog and giving it to his girlfriend. (This aspect of the plot is much the same as the Jordan Peele, Keegan Michael Key’s, comedy about a lost cat, Keanu.). John Goodman is there as a beach bum who owns a surfing store and is bewildered at his divorce.

The plot is fairly meandering, not of great interest – which means that the film is little better than a brightly coloured time-passer.