Review of Once Upon a Time in Venice (2017) by John M — 18 Sep 2017

I suppose Bruce Willis has bills to pay, too. So this is about a deadbeat Private Investigator (Willis). He's working a case when his dog gets stolen, but if he can connect the dots, he will soon see that there are no coincidences.

Now I knew nothing about this going in, I really just watched it because it was released this year and headlined Bruce Willis, albeit a direct-to-video offering. I had a disconnect with this almost immediately when this started when it introduced the 62-year-old Bruce Willis as a cool, hip, skateboarding detective, and not in an ironic way.

It's preposterous in every sense of the word, and this is a movie that seems to believe that its star is still in his 1988 Die Hard heyday. Now this isn't an untalented cast, and there are recognizable faces to this.

In addition to Willis, there is Adam Goldberg, Famke Janssen, Jason Momoa and John Goodman. Unfortunately, I believe that this was a film that subscribed to the Dr. Uwe Boll school of filmmaking in that these are actors that happened to be between movies and had a couple of days to spare, so why not make an extra buck.

This is a film that has awkward sensibilities and doesn't know how to properly land a punch line. It's goofy and never in a good way, and it is filled to the brim with scenes that don't work in any capacity.

What the makers of this think will work ends up being painful, and to top it all off, the editing pieces this together in a way that makes no sense, and I am even talking about gaps in logic within the same scene.

There are a number of different times where you are trying to grasp what is going from on from one plot point to the next, and it doesn't fit together, which has everything to do with an amateur edit job.

Even more flabbergasting is that this is about as basic of a crime movie as can be, so it really shouldn't have been all that complicated. I actively disliked the actor who played the role of the narrator (Thomas Middleditch), and he really struck me as a poor man's Joel Moore, which is not something I expected to ever write in this blog.

There are so many subplots in this, it starts to feel like they are present just for padding sake, which is never a good sign in a 90-minute movie. It is clichéd to a fault, and there is absolutely positively no reason for anybody to waste their time on this, not that you have likely ever heard of this, anyway.