Close Range (2015)

Close Range (2015) Aka: Dust Up

Starring: Scott Adkins, Nick Chinlund, Caitlin Keats, Madison Lawlor, Tony Perez, Jake La Botz, Anthony L. Fernandez, Randy Hall, Scott Evans, Jeremy Marinas, Ray Diaz, Jimmy Chhiu, Bryan Cartago

Director: Isaac Florentine

Action Director(s): Jeremy Marinas, David Wald

Close Range was Isaac Florentine’s next film after the well-received Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, which also starred Scott Adkins. I’m pretty sure that the hopes were high for another classic martial arts opus from these two geniuses on either side of the camera. Although Florentine brings his eye for action to this film, giving it a unique “modern Western” feel, people expecting another Ninja or Undisputed sequel will be disappointed. But don’t let that stop from enjoying this short-but-sweet action thriller.

The film opens in Hermosillo, Mexico—where my paternal grandmother’s mother hailed from—at a building that houses members of the infamous Garcia Cartel. A white guy, later identified as Colton MacReady (Scott Adkins, of Undisputed II and Triple Threat), enters the building and goes through the metal detector without a problem. Once in the elevator, he slips a small knife from behind his belt buckle and stabs the two men in the elevator to death. Once on their floor, the proceeds to slice everybody on that floor to pieces as he searches for a kidnapped girl. That would be Hailey Reynolds (Madison Lawlor, of Rise of the Valkyrie and The Axe Murders of Villisca), MacReady’s niece. He rescues Hailey and kills the cartel bigwig, Victor (Ray Diaz), who had her holed up. He pockets the key to Hailey’s handcuffs, not noticing (or maybe he does) the flash memory stick hanging from the same keychain. The two then make a break for it back to Arizona.

Obviously, the head of the Cartel chief, Fernando Garcia (Latin Dragon’s Tony Perez), is not very happy about this. First of all, Victor was his nephew. Even more important (to Garcia), is that the flash memory has all of the details to his operation on it. Losing it would be bad enough. If it fell into the hands of the DEA, then the results might be outright catastrophic. Garcia calls in a favor to Sheriff Jasper Calloway, who represents the law in the county where Hailey lives with her mother, Angela (Caitlin Keates, who had a small role in Kill Bill Vol. 2), and her asshole stepfather, Walt (Jake La Botz, Rambo and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). 

Long story short: Walt is a mule for the Garcia cartel. On one transport, he decided to keep a kilo for himself. Bad move. Victor and his men kidnaped Hailey and held her hostage. Although Walt returned the coke, Vic had took a liking to the girl and kept her longer—probably hoping that she would succumb to Stockholm Syndrome at some point. A desperate Angela contacted her brother, Colton, now a military fugitive, to help her. And now we got this mess, which is a handful of cadavers and a missing McGuffin. 

Fernando asks the Sheriff and find Colton and keep him around until Fernando and his “soldiers” can come and handle him (and get the McGuffin back). Although Jasper is on the take and thus indebted to Garcia, he knows MacReady from the ol’ days and knows that the man is really the wrong dude to screw with. It doesn’t take long before the film becomes Rio Bravo-with-martial-arts.

Scott Adkins feels like he’s in cruise control in this, with limited dialog and emotional range. His Colton MacReady is an ex-military badass, but the film mainly requires him to be angry or in active ass-kicker mode. Nick Chinlund, who looks like a discount Fred Ward, fares better in the acting department. Madison Lawlor mainly looks scared and afraid. Caitlin Keates gets to jump back and forth between “worried mother” and “mother who will protect her family at all costs.”

The bad guys are Mexican Cartel types. They run around shooting AK-47s and look intimidating. A few of them even know martial arts. Showing more range than them is Jake La Botz (looking like a discount Robert Patrick circa 1999) as the jerk-off stepdad, who is the cause of all this confusion: if he hadn’t tried to steal the flour, none of this would have happened. And man, that dude will throw anyone under the bus if it means saving his own skin.

Casual action fans will probably enjoy this a lot, although fighting afficionados may place this a bit closer to “above average.” A lot of the action is gunplay, some of it standard and some of it stylish. We do get some nice bloody bullet wounds and squibs, including a nasty head wound from one of the main characters. The gunplay is very much standard “stand-off” shooting until it’s time for someone to die.

The fight scenes were staged by Jeremy Marinas, who plays Cruz, the cousin of Victor (the cartel lieutenant who gets offed in the first scene). Marinas actually has a strong résumé as a fight choreographer, which includes The Beekeeper; John Wick 4; Silent Night; and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. He honestly does a good job and should get more recognition among fight choreographers than just the aging Hong Kong guard, Kenji Tanigaki, and Tim Man.  The fights are a nice mix of complex knife fighting, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and Adkins’s trademark kicking skills.

The showstopper fight—Scott Adkins versus Marinas himself—represents the film’s greatest strength and weakness. The fight occurs at about the halfway point of the film and is a nice exchange of punches, kicks, arm locks, throws, ground fighting…the whole she-bang-a-bang. The choreography and rhythm are perfect and stands up to anything made in Hong Kong at the time. As expected from an expert like Florentine, the camera work and editing complement the fighting and never detract from it.

The problem is that this is the best fight in the film. There is a brief two-on-one at the end between Adkins and two cartel enforcers: Zavala (Jimmy Chhiu, who choreographed the Shazam! sequel and the Rebel Moon films) and Montez (Bryan Cartago, who has been a stuntman on lots of Hollywood films). The fight looks good, and ends on a particularly brutal note, but it is very short and never feels like Adkins will lose. It would have been better for the fight with Marinas to have been the last one, as it is the best fight, the hardest fight, and the most emotionally-significant fight, given that the Cruz character is fighting for revenge. Both Cruz and Victor were apparently high up on the cartel hierarchy, so it would have made more sense for him to be the final boss, fight-wise. Zavala and Montez looking intimidating, but Cruz as the main baddie would have carried more weight. This misjudgment of fight placement makes this “good,” maybe “very good,” but not “excellent,” much less “a classic.”