Movie Review: 'Proud Mary'

Proud Mary has the ambition and the movie star to become a franchise. The question it leaves behind, however, is whether or not the people behind it have the talent and investment to make it something more than just a stock action movie. For my money, other than star Taraji P. Henson, Proud Mary comes up quite short. Other than the star, there is nothing memorable or particularly special about Proud Mary.

Mary (Henson) is a professional killer and when we meet her, she’s hard at work. Sneaking her way into a high rise apartment in Boston, Mary dispatches her target with little effort. Unfortunately, she finds that her target has a son, Danny (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), who was home when she dispatched the target. Protocol would call for her to kill the kid but Mary has a code and when the kid doesn’t spot her, she slips away.

Cut to one year later, Mary has been tracking Danny, driven by her guilt. Danny’s life has gone from Boston high rise to living on the street and working for a low level Russian drug dealer named Uncle (Xander Berkley). When Mary decides to rescue Danny, she sets off a war between the Russians and her boss, Benny (Danny Glover). The Russians want revenge and Benny doesn’t know that it was his top killer who set off the war, only that everyone is now trying to kill everyone else. The plot turns on whether the kid will be Mary’s downfall by revealing her accidental betrayal.

The plot sounds a lot more active and engaged than Proud Mary actually is. The reality is that Proud Mary is rather dull. There are two signature action scenes in the movie and both are hampered by the cliché of faceless villains who can’t shoot straight. Only Mary and her former partner, Benny’s son Tom, played by Billy Brown, are allowed to hit things they aim at.

That said, Mary does get shot twice in the span of 24 hours but her name being in the title indicates that bullets for her are little more than a scraped knee rather than anything that might slow her down. This is yet another mark of a plot that doesn’t care for your intelligence. The film was directed by Babak Najafi, a director familiar with indestructible characters who are the only people who can hit things they shoot; he directed the remarkably idiotic London has Fallen with the master of the idiot plot, Gerard Butler.

One of the big problems with Proud Mary, among many, is the self-seriousness of the plot. At times, the makers of Proud Mary forget they are making an action movie and instead aim toward pathos with scenes of heavy family drama. The trailer is selling a female John Wick and the movie is giving us talky sequences about family, loyalty, and trust. I’m sitting there thinking, when is Mary going to start killing people again?

Proud Mary isn’t all bad. Taraji P. Henson is an incredible actress who elevates every second of her time on screen. Her scenes with Danny Glover have a liveliness that the rest of the film is lacking and if perhaps those two and a lot more action sequences were present in Proud Mary, we would be talking about a pretty good movie. Instead, we get dull family dramatics, killers who can’t shoot straight, and dialogue wherein everyone always reintroduces themselves and their relationship ala “Mary, remember when I took you in?” Or, “Mary, remember when we were together?"

Yes, I am sure Mary remembers important moments in her life, movie. I’m sure Mary remembers that she was living on the streets and was taken in by Benny and trained to be a killer. Yes, I am sure she remembers that she dated Tom. Yet, the script keeps dropping these leaden bits of dialogue to tell us about these moments in Mary’s life because we might not be bright enough to infer how Mary arrived where she is in the plot.

These dialogue heavy scenes where characters deliver backstory as if delivering heavy packages from UPS could easily be replaced with more action. The film takes eons attempting to weigh Mary’s backstory down with drama while a better movie could have implied the same backstory visually and kept the pace moving. It’s not as if director Najafi can’t direct an action scene, the big finale is quite good, but he doesn’t seem to get how to pace an action movie and he’s way too invested in the dull drama.

Proud Mary should have been a fast-paced, bullet-riddled funhouse attraction. Instead, we get a script that wants to be taken seriously but is far too dimwitted and poorly written. When the film is focused on Taraji P. Henson being a badass killer, there is a pretty good movie going on. When it shifts gears and tries to have pathos, Proud Mary sinks under the weight and becomes a dreary, shiftless bore.