Taglines: She’s got one night to save her life.
Vanquish Movie Storyline. The aforementioned heroine is Victoria (Ruby Rose) and as she enters the picture, she’s arriving at her job providing evening care for Damon (Morgan Freeman—yes, Morgan Freeman), a retired and wheelchair-bound cop in his palatial estate with her adorable moppet daughter Lily (Juju Journey Brener) in tow. Lily, it turns out, is ill and Victoria confesses to Damon that she cannot possibly afford the necessary treatment.
Damon magnanimously offers to pay for the treatment but he will require a service. As his digs probably suggest, Damon was a corrupt cop engaged in all sorts of illicit deals around town. And in the wake of a recent double cross, he decides to pull his money from five associates around town and asks Victoria to put her own former skill set—she once worked with her late brother as a drug courier for the Russian mob—to use by making the pickups over the course of that night. At first, Victoria refuses—she has left that life behind and such—but when it turns out that Lily has vanished, and Damon won’t return her until the job is done, she reluctantly agrees.
Any hopes that this will just be a quiet and nondescript series of pickups and drop-offs pretty much goes out the window when Victoria arrives at the first destination, recognizes the criminal she is collecting from as being the guy who killed her brother, and slaughters him and a roomful of his minions. (She also helps a sex worker escape, so I guess the karmic scales are even.)
From there, things go downhill as each new trip brings an encounter with allegedly colorful criminals (including one who clearly thinks he’s playing Alfred Molina in “Boogie Nights” and greets Victoria with the deathless line “I hear you killed more people than Quentin Tarantino. Mint julep?”) that ends in either a fight scene, gunplay, or a chase before heading back to Damon’s place for yet another enigmatic conversation (while never just going from room to room in search of her daughter).
Meanwhile, Victoria’s activities capture the attention of an array of crooked cops, feds, and government agents—at least one of whom actually gets to say that a piece of information is “above your pay grade”—who all try to stop her in equally ineffectual ways.
Vanquish is a 2021 American action thriller film directed by George Gallo. The film stars Ruby Rose and Morgan Freeman. Vanquish was released in select theaters starting from April 16, 2021, as well as on-demand and digital on April 23 and on DVD and Blu-ray April 27.
Film Review for Vanquish
The sensory overload in “Vanquish” kicks in right from the start, with an opening credits montage featuring a pounding techno score, images of snakes and guns and a lighthouse and an eyeball and a flock of birds, the sounds of police sirens, and a montage of newspaper headlines and reports chronicling the career achievements of one Damon Hickey, who we’re told rose all the way up to being “America’s Police Commissioner,” which is not a thing but there you have it.
Lionsgate presents a film directed by George Gallo and written by Gallo and Samuel Bartlett. Rated R (for bloody violence, language, some sexual material and drug use). Running time: 96 minutes. Opens Friday in theaters and April 20 on demand.
By the time those opening credits calm the bleep down, we know that Hickey, played by Morgan Freeman, was gunned down on his front doorstep, presumably on the orders of some disgruntled drug dealer or crime boss, and is now retired and in a wheelchair for life.
Cut to a church in the dead of night, which gives director George Gallo another opportunity to pile on the overwrought symbolism, as we see rows of candles and statues of saints and light refracting through stained glass windows as Damon bares his soul to a crooked priest who quickly changes the subject to inform Damon their whole criminal operation is in danger because one of Damon’s henchmen has turned against them and is singing to the feds.
That’s right. Damon was a hero cop — but he was also a criminal mastermind who has continued to oversee operations from his enormous lair, which looks like a good-sized modern art museum. This is getting complicated fast!
Victoria (Ruby Rose) is the single mom of a girl (Juju Journey Brener) with a potentially fatal condition. Lionsgate
Dripping in self-conscious touches, riddled with cheap crime-movie dialogue and deeply dependent on one ho-hum shootout and chase scene after another, “Vanquish” is a slick and forgettable thriller with the great Morgan Freeman giving one of his least interesting performances ever and the talented Ruby Rose grimly trying to infuse some life into a thinly drawn character who must un-retire from her previous criminal past and pull off one last seemingly suicidal mission, because she has no other choice. Bummer!
Rose plays Victoria, who works as a caretaker for Damon. Victoria is the single mother to an adorable daughter named Lily (Juju Journey Brener), who is suffering from a mysterious, unnamed and potentially fatal condition. The wealthy Damon says he will help out Victoria — but only if she’ll make five stops in one night, picking up large sums of ill-gotten cash every step of the way. Oh, and Damon has kidnapped Lily, so Victoria doesn’t have much say in the matter.
Cue to the montages of Victoria entering one ludicrously overdecorated lair after another and dealing with one snarling gangster after another. Time and again, there’s a problem, and there’s a shootout, and there’s a chase sequence, which at least offers sweet relief from lines such as, “So, we meet again,” “We want you to come over to our side,” and “You’re the only person I can trust.” Many scenes are bathed in a sickly green, as if we’re watching everything through cheap night-vision goggles; others are tinted blood-red. No matter what filters are used, there’s no disguising this is garbage wrapped in a glossy package.
Vanquish (2021)
Directed by: George Gallo
Starring: Ruby Rose, Morgan Freeman, Nick Vallelonga, Miles Doleac, Patrick Muldoon, Joel Michaely, Juju Journey Brener, Julie Lott, Ekaterina Baker, Hannah Stocking
Screenplay by: George Gallo, Samuel Bartlett
Production Design by: Joe Lemmon
Cinematography by: Anastos N. Michos
Film Editing by: Yvan Gauthier
Costume Design by: Melissa Vargas
Set Decoration by: Steve Moon
Music by: Aldo Shllaku
MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, language, some sexual material and drug use.
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: April 16, 2021 (United States)
Visits: 47
