Tyrese Gibson

(On Cable TV, September 2022) There are a few interesting ideas bouncing around Dangerous, and more than a few dashes of welcome dark humour—but the entire thing stubbornly refuses to become enjoyable. The film at least gets an acknowledgement for playing around with the idea of a dangerous, jaded assassin figure—by having him being in frequent phone therapy with his psychiatrist (a relatively enjoyable Mel Gibson, literally phoning in his performance safely isolated from the rest of the case) and showing him trying to get away from the psychopathic thrill of killing. But the film doesn’t really have any use for a pacifist: not when he’s got to protect his estranged family against a bunch of bloodthirsty mercenaries. The isolated Pacific northwestern location in which the film takes place has a whopper of a secret, but all of this is window-dressing to a coolly efficient killer killing even more despicable killers. It’s unfortunate, then, that for the film’s occasional inventions (including a hidden WW2-era Japanese submarine!), it really can’t bring itself to anything more than a low-budget straight-to-streaming effort. (Yes, I know Dangerous was released in theatres. I’m just saying it should not have been.)  The action is murky and dull, most of the dialogues are pedestrian (exception made of the psychologist patter, but you’d have to work overtime to mess those up), the set designs are cheap and David Hackl’s tightly enclosed direction seems to make things look even worse. For a cast of relatively known names in the B-movie space, Dangerous wastes a lot of talent—Scott Eastwood is bland and generic, Famke Janssen doesn’t have much to do and Tyrese Gibson doesn’t have an outlet for his usual glibness. A lot is left on the table here, but the script should have understood from the get-go that if you’re building an action thriller, you’re building pure entertainment—the rest comes after, once you’ve figured out the basic structure of the thing. Dangerous doesn’t have even that—it’s just a bunch of ideas thrown in a sack, and inelegantly executed.