Bring Him to Me
March 1st, 2024
MOVIE: BRING HIM TO ME
STARRING: BARRY PEPPER, JAMIE COSTA, SAM NEILL, RACHEL GRIFFITHS
DIRECTED BY: LUKE SPARKE
AMovieGuy.com’s RATING: 2 STARS (Out of 4)
When a movie has gangsters, thugs, ruthless killers, hitmen, goons, and all the other words you can think of, the excitement is initially there. Bring Him to Me has plenty of characters that might fit the description, with Barry Pepper as the lead, a hired driver with instructions to go rob a top mob boss and bring the money they take back to his mob boss. It’s supposed to be simple in and out but when the delivery shows up 25K lighter there is someone who must pay for it. It could be thrilling stuff but instead, Bring Him to Me spends too much time talking and not enough time delivering action.
The story opens with a driver (Barry Pepper) and two masked men busting into the shop of an art dealer (played by Same Neill), holding him and his son at gunpoint. What transpires is explained further as the story goes along, but then we fast forward to our driver and his passenger (Jamie Costa) headed to deliver a bag of cash to a mob boss. On the way they have conversations, are stopped by a police officer, chased by bikers, and have a lot of tension between the two of them. The question becomes will they make it in one piece?
As a narrative, this could have been a winning film for director Luke Sparke. Pepper in the lead role certainly looks the part, sporting a ZZ Top-style beard, wearing leather, and having a gruff stare. What doesn’t work is the structure from writer Tom Evans, who bounces the story between flashbacks, flashforwards, long stretches of conversation in the car, jumping back to the robbery, jumping forward to them delivering the cash to the big boss- played by Rachel Griffiths- and then finally putting it all together. It kills all the flow, making Bring Him to Me a mix of boring stretches and mini-moments that would be better movies.
There’s not a lot of fault to the performances, although it often seems that those performances would have more gravity if the story was told linearly, but also wasted on us. Neill is playing a bit heavier of a role, as a mean boss, often threatening anyone who messes with him, while Griffiths comes in as a bad guy with little context. It’s genuinely sad because the look and feel of a good heist and mean mobster movie is there, but the screenplay messes it all up.
Bring Him to Me has good bone structure but bad bones. It could have a similar tone to something like Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly or Dennis Lehane’s The Drop because it certainly has a similar look to those films. Pacing can often be crucial to the success and failure of a movie. Bring Him to Me falls just short of making it across the finish line.
BRING HIM TO ME IS PLAYING IN SELECT THEATERS AND AVAILABLE ON DEMAND.
2 STARS
Written by: Leo Brady
leo@amovieguy.com
