Review: Reprisal

Somewhere in Brian A. Miller’s Reprisal, there are seeds for a Hitchcockian thriller in the vein of Strangers on a Train. A milquetoast bourgeois encounters a man of brutal tendencies, and the former’s terror at the latter’s actions is only a thin screen for the fascination and envy he truly feels. Beneath the bourgeois’s revulsion is an attraction to violence—perhaps, even, an attraction to the man with no restraint. But nothing so interesting as that ever plays out among Reprisal’s male characters, as this bland and at times barely coherent melodrama prefers its gender archetypes unproblematized.

The filmmakers are at least conscious enough of the line they want to draw between hero and villain that they cast very similar-looking actors as a bank manager, Jacob (Frank Grillo), and the heavily armed masked man, Gabriel (Johnathon Schaech), who robs the bank while the former is at work. Traumatized by the event, Jacob becomes obsessed with tracking the criminal down, calling on the aid of his neighbor, James (Bruce Willis), a retired police officer. And Jacob, of course, has a wife and daughter (Olivia Culpo and Natalia Sophie Butler, respectively)—all the better to serve as kidnap bait in the inevitable climactic showdown, in which Jacob, who’s the son of a cop and regrets not following in his father’s footsteps, reclaims his blue-collar masculinity by repeatedly firing a handgun in a public park.

Reprisal’s script manages to combine the obvious with the befuddling, as when Jacob and James reconstruct Gabriel’s elaborate scheme by reviewing information we already know. Their disjointed dialogue adds up to neither a revelation nor really even a conversation, and it leads to one of the film’s silliest lines. A key moment in their sleuthing comes when Jacob suggests about the masked man who’s robbed three banks: “Maybe he’s after paper—maybe he’s after money.” The men act as if they’ve divined the elusive key to some master plan—at which point a montage kicks into motion as they furrow their brows and very intensely point to maps tacked to a bulletin board.

This basement powwow is then intercut with Gabriel training for his next heist. This sequence is emblematic of the worst tendencies of the film’s camerawork, which is disorienting in a forced attempt to bring excitement to the dullest of scenes. In banal dialogue sequences, the camera’s restless circling is enough to make one dizzy. The film’s action scenes are also low in energy, but the camerawork attempts to disguise this by way of excessive stylization that’s often misplaced and distracting. At one point, as cops fire toward the camera in long shot, the filmmakers try to capture a sense of verité by jostling the camera to the left and then to the right.

A nugget of interest the viewer might take away from this cheap-looking, roughly assembled film is the way that it betrays its own barely repressed desires. Reprisal is much more interested in Schaech’s special-forces-trained killer than it is in its heroes. The film depicts with admiring detail the man’s weapons, outfits, headquarters, and training methods. The extended credit sequence, in which Gabriel suits up for the bank heist, brings to mind Joel Schumacher’s fetishistic attention to Batman suiting up at the start of Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, but without the playfulness or irony. Reprisal is at pains to profess its faith in the symbols of law and order, but it cannot fully repress its almost erotic longing for the unfettered violence of the terrorist.