When just about everything goes wrong with a movie, you get Redemption Day. It’s a wannabe Jack Ryan/Tom Clancy geopolitical thriller that doesn’t have the smarts for those ambitions. It’s poorly directed and mushily edited, the acting is sometimes pretty bad, it had a severe lack of action or thrills, and what action is has is anemic. The only thing saving the movie from the full garbage heap is that, I have to admit, there are a few scenes that generate suspense.

The film has a basic enough premise. An archeologist in the Middle East is kidnapped by Arab Terrorists out of central casting and only her soldier husband can free her.

Pretty basic concept with a remarkably and irrationally detailed setup… almost 30 minutes of story involving the discovery of ancient bones proving mankind is older that previously thought, the discovery of an ancient city, and all these other details that don’t matter to the movie once she’s kidnapped. A five minute exposition scene could have picked up the pace of this rather sluggish film since none of this backstory ultimately matters.

And what follows is a really bad attempt at a Clancy film… one that makes me respect Without Remorse on Amazon more (that wasn’t a great film but at least it wasn’t this). It tries to involve the state department, geopolitics, and a moral about Big Oil. None of it works, none of it is interesting, and none of it is particularly convincing.

The lead actor – who I’m not familiar with – is remarkably bad too. I gather he’s got a career in TV and I have to imagine he’s better there. Or maybe the dialog he’s forced to recite her is so bad he didn’t have the ambition to try. On top of that, it feels like most of the dialog in the film is poorly ADR’d… lips don’t quite match the voice in many scenes. It got distracting… or perhaps I was so bored, I started staring at their mouths for entertainment.

So, yeah, this is a mess of a movie. There’s no point in watching it when there’s much better films that more successfully give us spy/action capers with geopolitical overtones.

Score: 62