one gibble out of five
Director: Mike Gunther
First off – how was Bruce Willis in this? You should know that I’m a Willis-ite. I’ve seen at least 90% of the guy’s filmed output, including walk-ons, cameos, uncredited stuff, TV shows, etcetera and etcetera. I’m not claiming there hasn’t been some questionably bad stuff there, and some outright silly stuff, but even during his slow years I never felt that Willis just took a paycheck.
Let me clarify that: Bruce – in watching the extras on the many DVDs of his I own – can be strongheaded. It takes an equally strongheaded, or confident, director to keep Bruce in line and to work with him to get a good performance. Otherwise he dials it in, he goes into Bruce mode and acts it the way he wants to, which, despite years of experience, may not always be what’s right. So he’s ‘taken some paychecks’ in the sense that I don’t think he’s been pushed outside of his comfort zone for many roles, but I don’t think he just picks up a script and nods without at least some connection to it. He knew Demi, so he was in Charlie’s Angels, or Stallone getting him for Expendables. And hell, it’s funny to just be a barking dog in a movie, so why not do the Rugrats film? Dot dot dot, I always see some reason for it, when I put on my “think like Bruce Willis” brain modifier.
Mike Gunther is not a strongheaded director. In the extras for ‘Set Up’, he gushes all over Brucey, and I’m sure Brucey walked all over him during filming. But what was the connection? How could Bruce be in this? Was it some 50 Cent connection from his work on The Hip-Hop Story? Was it the Randy Couture link from Expendables? IMDB may offer some insight – Gunther isn’t a director, he’s a stuntman. He’s been a stuntman for years, actually, and worked on some pretty big films. Including Die Hard 4, for which he also directed some behind the action special, one of his seven director’s credits (versus the 150+ stunt credits) in the past few years when it seems he’s been trying to make the transition to behind the camera. I guess all of that’s enough time to make some friends on the right movies.
Whatever. That was my burning question when watching this.
Because Set Up is appallingly bad. Worse than I expected. Worse than a lot of movies I’ve seen, and as all of us bad movie watchers like to say: I’VE SEEN A LOT OF BAD MOVIES. I’d like to believe ol’ Pudding Top (i.e. 50 “I’ll never call you Curtis Jackson” Cent) can act, but beyond having a good stoic face his line delivery and body movements and facial expressions (besides stoic face, which he ends up using for a lot of emotions) are all rank. Which starts the movie out as rank, since it’s his voice we hear in voiceover, attempting to set up some intrigue for the viewer.
Intrigue? What’s that? Director Gunther and co-scripter Mike Behrman have no idea. Set Up purports to be about a diamond heist gone wrong – one of the gunmen (Ryan Phillippe) turns on the others (one of whom is 50… erk… Curtis Jackson), shooting his two partners and making off with the score. But one of his partners survives! Because you shot them both in the shoulder! Which, I know, I thought was a lethal spot to get shot also. I guess I can stop wearing these metal shoulders pads everywhere. Also: Spoiler: the survivor is 50 Cent. But instead of going for straight-up revenge flick, Set Up tries to get clever by throwing in other players vying for the diamonds – including mob boss Bruce Willis – and getting Jackson all conflicted like with some pointless scenes in a church where he questions his faith.
Look – it’s no fun to just bash a film. Some people certainly hang out in the fringes purposefully making B-movies, but I know that’s not the case with a lot of what’s out there. But Set Up is filled, from the outset, with too many “why would you do that?” scenarios that after about ten minutes, you stop caring. The consequences for the character’s actions never hit home (“No one had to die!” and yet, we all unload automatic weapons into crowds of people), we know nothing about them (showing us that one of them has a wife does not automatically make us care about the wife), and the script is full of cliched lines that are delivered as-is off the page with hardly any inflection added. The sharp definition of the colors are nice, but nothing new in modern digital cinema. The editing and framing are standard, which I guess you could say was a positive, since they didn’t try anything overly flashy… The attempt at diagetic music was out of place, as was the stop-start soundtrack. And most disappointing are the inadvertent red herrings in the plot, elements that could’ve stirred up just a dash of something notable that end up being window dressing to stretch out the run time.
This is a bad film. You’ve been warned.
insert joke here poking fun at Willis' involvement in the film
vaguely-offensive 