MOVIE REVIEW - Homefront

The new Jason Statham action flick is Homefront, which was written and produced by Sylvester Stallone.

This is the story of a former DEA Agent named Phil Broker (Statham).  He leaves the DEA as an undercover agent after a major sting operation goes horribly wrong.  He then moves to rural Louisiana with his young daughter named Maddy (Izabela Vidovic).   They plan on starting over with a new town, and a new look on life.  But that turns out not to be so easy.

After Maddy has a bullying incident at school and ends up beating up the local bully kid, Broker finds himself in a situation where the locals are out for revenge against them, as they are "not from around here."   Then local low-life's start harassing them, led by the local lead thug, Gator (James Franco).   As the episodes escalate, we are headed towards a showdown with Gator and Phil.  You can see it coming a mile away.  

Broker, of course played by Statham, is a martial arts expert and ends up beating up about half the town in various scenes.  This is very violent with no shortage of large fight scenes as it's main selling point.  Those scenes are relatively well done, and I am a Statham fan.  He is always likable and basically fun to watch in his yearly winter time violent movie.   But his is a bit different. This is a very bad script.

This Stallone written movie feels like something from 25 years ago most of the time. There is an attempt to bring it up to date with the subject of school bullying, and using meth as the drug of choice to feature here trafficked by the local thugs.   But the real fault of this script is the ongoing and very tired stereotypes of many characters created by Hollywood from the deep south.  The characters are old, tired and been done about a thousand times in other movies.  There is not a real hint of originality here.  The easiest route was taken and it doesn't do any of us any favors.

This drags terribly at times as you count off the minutes until Statham beats up another bunch of poor, helpless thugs in broad daylight with no repercussions.   It checks in at about one hour and forty minutes, but even that's too long, as this is so amazingly predictable and you are way ahead of this most of the time. 

Homefront.  Statham, as fun as he can be, can't save it.   It is what it is, but original... it certainly isn't.