Welcome to Cross Fade: The Movie… or possibly Terrible Editing with Unconvincing Character: The Movie. Vanquish is just… weirdly bad in some fascinating ways.

The story isn’t the problem… it doesn’t help, but it’s not a problem. It’s about as good or bad or indifferent as this kind of action/crime thriller needs. Crooked cop and crime lord (Morgan Freeman) blackmails a young woman (Ruby Rose) into picking up five packages of cash from a bunch of crooks.

But man, the editing on this movie is just BAD. Confusing and bad. The director or editor constantly uses cross fades and other weird camera tricks to move from scene to scene and shot to shot. And often this gets in the way of the flow of the movie but I think the cross fades are probably hiding abrupt, awkward edits of their own.

And all this ultimately is irrelevant since the actual action – or the lack of action – is bland, boring, and paced terribly. There’s remarkably little actual action in this action film though… which means the mediocre story needs to hold things up. And it can’t accomplish that either, mainly due to Ruby Rose’s apparently limited acting range and Morgan Freeman’s not bothering. Probably the first time where the cliché “he could read the phone book” proves to be untrue since he brings nothing to the part.

You know you’re in trouble when the flick has to spend valuable screen time on an improbably six minute opening credit and flashbacks to things that happened five minutes earlier. On multiple occasions.

Skip this one.

Score: 58