Muscle Men at WorkĪ doting husband and expecting father, ER nurse Paul Booker ( Anthony Mackie) clocks in for the evening to take care of his first patient, an unconscious criminal named Abe Guevara ( Frank Grillo). The remake of Point Blank has the ingredients for success, but the film never delivers, consistently fizzling out instead of coming to a boil. While Lynch offers bigger star power in his leading roles, the result is almost an entirely wasted effort, offering minimal thrills and dismal storytelling to a tone-deaf feature. Nearly a decade later, Hollywood (or rather, Netflix) has finally smelled the blood in the water, with director Joe Lynch ( Everly, Mayhem) stepping in to offer his own iteration of Cavayé’s source material. It was an interesting twist on a familiar tale, offering a slick, effective piece of escapist entertainment that evaporated as soon as you left the cinema. The wrinkle here is that our hero is just an Average Joe, and without a particular set of skills to rely on, he ultimately must team up with a hardened criminal to delve into a seedy underworld and rescue his loved one. Wisely, the film bore no resemblance to the Boorman production other than its shared title, with the film itself much more akin to the Taken series, which involves a man trying to find his kidnapped wife. This did not seem to deter Fred Cavayé, whose 2010 French thriller was released in the U.S. It would be a fool’s errand for any subsequent filmmaker to even think about granting one of their own films with the same title. It was a mighty fine piece of work (arguably Boorman’s greatest effort) and has since cast a long shadow over the crime-thriller genre. When brought up in any serious film discussion, the title of Point Blank typically refers to John Boorman’s 1967 masterpiece, a barnstormer of a tough guy cum arthouse picture, featuring an indomitable lead performance from Lee Marvin.
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