Review: Dangerous Delivers VOD-Ready Thrills in a Standard-Issue Package

Dangerous betrays the promise of its title by playing things extremely safe.

Dangerous
Photo: Lionsgate

David Hackl’s Dangerous contemplates a not especially original proposition, familiar from many VOD-ready action titles: Can a violent sociopath be redeemed by taking on a group of even worse violent sociopaths? This inquiry applies to Dylan “D” Forrester (Scott Eastwood), newly released from prison after a stint for murder. D, though, isn’t necessarily a terrible person, a somewhat confusing point that the film is quick to emphasize in case we’re wary about rooting for him. He just lacks the ability to understand emotions, which led him astray into a world of shady mercenary work after a tour with the Navy Seals.

Nowadays, D is just trying to stay on the straight and narrow, until he gets word that his brother, Sean (Matt Brown), has suddenly died. After then defending himself against an attempted hit on his life, D breaks his probation to make the long journey out to the hotel that Sean was renovating in the Pacific Northwest outpost of Guardian Island. Upon arriving there, he’s greeted by Sean’s friends and colleagues, in addition to his mother, Linda (Brenda Bazinet), who wastes no time directing her grief and anger at her estranged “bad son.”

Hackl initially signals toward a whodunit, where everyone at the hotel looks like they have something to hide regarding Sean’s death, but those intimations are swiftly jettisoned in favor of rote action-movie machinations. A threatening group of tough guys promptly arrive on the scene, led by D’s former mercenary boss, Cole (Kevin Durand), and subsequently clear up any sense of mystery: Sean was in debt to them for a loan to purchase the hotel and now they’ve come to collect a stash of riches hidden somewhere on Guardian Island. Dangerous then proceeds to unfold as a standard-issue shoot ‘em up, as the small island’s inhabitants hole up in the hotel and D emerges as their last line of defense against the intruders.

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Dangerous makes attempts at humor through all of this, particularly as D endeavours to hold off the goons without causing harm before he’s forced to indulge his former predilection for bloodlust. “That felt gooood,” he purrs after finally allowing himself to kill again. And Mel Gibson appears briefly as loopy psychiatrist Dr. Alderwood, whom D frequently calls to help him cope with his resurfaced homicidal urges, but the stagnant humor of these interactions just brings to mind how a similar scenario was better utilized in George Armitage’s Grosse Pointe Blank, which mined the neuroses of violent individuals with far more satirical insight.

Eastwood, for his part, plays D as stoically as possible, sounding more and more like his famous father with each detached line reading, but Christopher Borrelli’s hackneyed script ensures that his character remains a frustrating cypher. Durand seems to be having the most fun of anybody with his maniacal loose-cannon routine, but it’s nothing more than a limp variation on a caricature that he’s been typecast as since his supporting role in Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces. It’s clear that Hackl and Borrelli want to set up an ultimate psychological showdown between two unstable individuals, but instead of truly probing their ostensibly twisted minds, Dangerous betrays the promise of its title by playing things extremely safe.

Score: 
 Cast: Scott Eastwood, Tyrese Gibson, Kevin Durand, Famke Janssen, Mel Gibson, Brenda Bazinet, Matt Brown  Director: David Hackl  Screenwriter: Christopher Borrelli  Distributor: Lionsgate  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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