It’s been years since Bruce Willis cared about masking his boredom with the movies he’s nowadays cast in, but in spite of this, another of his mediocre recent efforts is maintaining a position in Netflix’s Top 10 list this week.
Marauders is a 2016 action thriller where a gang of bank robbers pull off a series of heists that each end in a specific fatality, with Willis playing the head of the banking conglomerate in whose branches each robbery took place. His presence is largely peripheral to the main story, it being almost an hour into the proceedings before his disconnected scenes actually link up with the core plot, but his utter lack of interest is clear in every moment he’s on screen. It might even be that he wasn’t given a full script, but just showed up on the days that he was scheduled to perform and read the lines he was provided with his now familiar apathy.
Everything ties back to a conspiracy involving a botched kidnapping and a dead unit of Army Rangers, but to be honest, by the time the justification for the film’s monotonous events and ham-fisted attempts at characterization actually comes around, you’ll be past caring. As well as Willis’ marked indifference, the movie also manages to waste Christopher Meloni’s wired energy and Dave Bautista’s physicality and natural charisma, all coming together in a story that’s as forgettable and generic as the pic’s title.
The maintained ranking of Marauders makes it evident that many people thought it looked like a decent film to sit down and take in, or lockdown ended up devouring their watch lists and now they’re just scraping the barrel. Whatever the reason they deigned to give it a shot, by the end of the movie, their faces likely matched that of Bruce Willis in utter boredom.
