DETECTIVE KNIGHT: ROGUE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SADNESS

It's always sad when big stars and big names bow out on projects that aren't worthy of them: you always hate for a terrible movie to be the last one with your favourite actors or by your favourite directors and you always hope that they've one last decent movie left in them. In the case of this curtain call for Bruce Willis it's doubly affecting: not only is this DTV cops-and-robbers nonsense a poor career-closer for him, but it's patently and tragically clear that they're struggling to work around the aphasia that led Willis to announce his retirement last year. Much of the film is devoted to other characters, his cop partner does much of the legwork, and the dialogue scenes that Knight has are blatantly edited around him, leaving him as a half-presence, a near blank, a guest star role in his own film. Strictly speaking this isn't Willis' actual swansong: it's the first of a Knight trilogy and while the other instalments (Redemption and Independence) are on my rental queue, in all honesty I'm not sure I want to see them.

For a good chunk of the running time Detective Knight: Rogue is actually another take on Michael Mann's Heat. Edward Drake is not Michael Mann and this has none of the character, intrigue, excitement or suspense of Heat - it doesn't even have gorgeous cinematography or a terrific soundtrack. It has a ruthless gang of masked bank robbers whose latest heist ends in gunfire and leaves Knight's partner on life support. The robbery was at the behest of crime lord Winna (Michael Eklund) who has history with Knight; Knight and his new partner head for New York before Winna's next Big Job...

Like Heat, time is spent with the bad guys' crew but their personal issues and problems aren't anywhere near as interesting. Their leader Rhodes (Beau Mirchoff) is a former sports star and painkiller addict who's in it for the adrenaline rush more than anything but doesn't like the increased Heat that comes from shooting down police officers - yeah, whatever, you're a bank robber and my sympathy for you is minimal. And because you don't care and you're not interested the action sequences have no impact - even if they weren't blandly staged machine gun shootouts. The Winna/Knight backstory is gabbled off in exposition and flashback and none of it sticks. And if they think they're honouring the legacy and legend of Die Hard they're way off - the Next Big Job is the theft of a rare baseball card and wasn't that the McGuffin of Cop Out?!?

I always like Bruce Willis: even though he was in action hero mode for so many movies he always looked, sounded and behaved like a vaguely regular person rather than an Arnie or a Sly, who don't seem to actually belong to the real world, and he didn't have the martial arts skills of a Jean-Claude (or even Steven Seagal). I always liked him even in movies that didn't work or didn't succeed: I'm one of the nine people on Earth who thought Hudson Hawk was unfairly maligned. But those days are long gone and so, sadly, is Willis, and this just isn't worthy of what he was.

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