DEADLOCK

US, 2021, 97 minutes, Colour.

Bruce Willis, Patrick Muldoon, Matthew Marsden, Michael DeVorzon, Ava Paloma, Kelcey Rose, Douglas Matthews, Johnny Messner.

Directed by Jared Cohen.

Deadlock is one of the many, very many, action films that Bruce Willis made every year in his later career. He was awarded the Razzie for ‘Worst Bruce Willis Performance in a Bruce Willis Film’. However, at the time, it was announced that Willis was suffering from aphasia and would not be making any more films. The management of the Razzies then withdrew the award.

This is a typical enough Bruce Willis action story except that he is the villain this time, self-centred, self-absorbed, absolutely ruthless and relentless. He does not hesitate to kill the many that he does not approve of.

The film opens with a raid on a drug house which goes wrong, killing an innocent bystander in the wrong house. Willis plays the father of the young man and his brother who has been arrested on suspicion of drug dealing. He wants the police to confess, and while they admit that it was an accident, he considers that they have lied. He gets their girlfriends to lure them to a meeting with him where he torments and kills them.

He leads a company of rogue soldiers to the hydroelectric plant in County Fitzgerald, Georgia, threatening to open the floodgates – which he does, and which actually floods the valley and the county. Absolutely relentless. He has allies with old veterans who work in the plant.

The hero of the film is past military, in security at the company, wakes with a hangover – one of his friends, an ally of Bruce Willis, wanted him not to turn up on the day of action. There are betrayals, shootings, a bus load of young students touring, a roundup of the staff, the students, helpless hostages. But the hero, played by Patrick Muldoon, along with another worker, Douglas Matthews, do some outwitting of the soldiers, getting the hostages to safety in their bus and escaping the plant. However, Muldoon does not do it all by himself, a lot of heroics, skill in shooting, some fights, but the authorities eventually calling in the Army to resolve the situation.

In the past decades, it would have been Bruce Willis in the Muldoon role and a villain like Alan Rickman being the relentless avenger.

The screenplay not always 100% persuasive, but this is a typical Bruce Willis action film, neither better nor worse than the others.