Vanquish finds director George Gallo careening in the opposite direction of a comeback. Ruby Rose stars as Victoria, a single mother whose past as a Russian drug smuggler comes back to haunt her when former mentor Damon (Morgan Freeman) kidnaps her sick daughter in exchange for one last job. Once a decorated top cop, a bullet has sidelined Damon, turning him into a bitter wheelchair-bound recluse eager to cross over to a life of wrongdoing by putting his vast knowledge of criminology to bad use. Turning up the guilt, Damon reminds Victoria that were it not for his largesse, she would have been jailed and her child placed in foster care. Alone in his pastel-lit mansion (“You didn’t think I could afford a place like this on a cop’s salary?”), Damon watches every one of Victoria’s moves through her body-cam, but there’s not much to observe. These characters have no life assigned to them; they’re stick-figure slaves to a godawful script co-penned by Gallo and Sam Bartlett. For the benefit of the unmindful in the audience, in two instances, a montage is called into action to help recap material that was covered just moments earlier. Using cross dissolves rather than straight cuts might have better suited dialogue scenes were there some motivation behind their disposition other than, “Hey! Wouldn’t it be cool if...” And the plotting is the least perplexing piece of the serrated puzzle. Audiences leave with one question left unanswered: why did Ruby Rose pass on a lucrative career as TV‘s Batwoman to co-star in schlock like this? (2021) — Scott Marks
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