Bruce Willis action factory Reprisal on Blu-ray

As part of the assembly line of about three movies per year that Bruce Willis has been cranking out this decade, he has starred or co-starred in a handful of the monthly home video productions for Lions Gate’s Premiere label the past couple of years. The latest of these is “Reprisal” ($21.99), due out on Blu-ray and digital Oct. 16.
Willis plays a supporting character — James, a retired cop neighbor of Jacob, a family man bank manager. When Jacob’s bank is robbed and a security guard is killed, Jacob feels like he should have been more pro-active during and feels like police and the FBI aren’t doing enough to find the robber, so he takes justice in his own hands to track down the killer and avenge the assault (sound familiar already?).

Frank Grillo (The Purge: Anarchy, and Alvey Kulina in the “Kingdom” TV series 2014-17) is Jacob, who does a decent job of being the every-man who is surprisingly adept at investigative and fighting skills, even though in his interview in the bonus features he sounds as if this job was almost a nuisance to him and no challenge at all. “It’s pretty easy; I’m not doing Chekhov. For me, stuff like this is like falling off a log.” He added that compared to his recent TV series where he had to “use his acting muscles,” this film “was not that difficult.”
Grillo continued to provide unusually derogatory comments in his promotional interview, which is even more surprisingly included on this disc.
He bashes the writer by saying he needed to “get the script right” because it “was a bit underwritten,” and he acts like Willis was barely in it with him – “He was a part of it; I don’t know how big of a part of it but he was a part of it.” (Willis is actually in a fair number of scenes, more than some star cameos in these types of movies).
The 53 year-old Grillo also appears to dismiss the significance of another co-star, Olivia Culpo, a 26 year-old model and 2012 Miss Universe who also has a significant role which she plays well as Jacob’s wife. “I think Olivia’s new to acting and kind of an Internet phenom or a Miss Universe or something, so she’s really green,” Grillo says. “But everybody deserves a shot, right?”

Much of the early part of the film features James and Jacob at a bulletin board in James’ basement discussing strategy on how to figure out the next move of the highly-trained assailant, Gabriel (Johnathon Schaech). The situation intensifies when Gabriel retaliates to when he learns that Jacob is hunting him by kidnapping Jacob’s wife and diabetic daughter. This prompts Jacob and James to initiate a more aggressive counter-attack.

It looks like much of the film’s budget was spent on a big armored car chase and shootout scene around an industrial section near downtown Cincinnati. The scene is fair but rather routine and nothing you wouldn’t see in a weekly episode of “Hawaii Five-O.” What’s the most interesting about the entire film is the Cincinnati location, a city we don’t often see in movies or TV shows.
The other notable element of this movie is that we get the perspective of the killer, for whom it seems we (and maybe James and Jacob) are supposed to develop some empathy for because he’s seen visiting his elderly, dementia-addled father and apparently needs the money for this purpose. But he also threatens the nursing home staff and Jacob and James don’t seem to give a rip about his personal issues and motivations. So, it’s not really understood why this movie even bothered revealing that side of the villain since it comes to nothing anyway.

Among the bonus features are 5-minute interviews with Grillo (described above) and several other cast members except Willis, as well as director Brian A. Miller, and a short making-of featurette in which the choice of Cincinnati is discussed.

— By Scott Hettrick