Homefront: A Homegrown Batch of Tropes

Critics tend to go hard on crowd-pleasing action movies because you can only see so much of a thing before it grows tiresome. What is for everyone else a safe and sure watch for an evening after a hard day's work is monotonous to anyone who watches movies for a living. Take Homefront, for instance, a rock-em-sock-em action movie where the soldiers and tanks are traded in for gangsters and schoolyard fights that balloon absurdly out of proportion. If Jason Statham were anyone else, his daughter's one-sided encounter with the schoolyard bully would have ended right then and there. After all, DEA agents sure teach their kids how to fight. But because this is a movie, the schoolyard bully may or may not have parents who may or may not be connected to a man who may or may not be the head of a local gang of rough, tough, and carelessly violent criminals who drink whiskey, eat crawfish, and fly the Confederate flag. And because this gang isn't well-versed in what usually happens to the bad guys in Statham's other movies, they decide to escalate the situation. Words are traded for fists are traded for knives are traded for guns, and this time around, it's the rednecks' turn to discover that Jason Statham is not a man to be trifled with, especially not when cameras are rolling.

The New Orleans setting of Homefront is satisfyingly grungy and boisterously American, and for a setting so charmingly pedestrian, it's a shame that this is often a hopelessly overdone movie. Edited like a fifteen-year-old got their hands on Adobe Premiere for the first time, Homefront contains enough quick cuts, loud music, and shaky cam to stun a healthy horse. The everyday setting of this movie would have been served well by a level of restraint, but it nevertheless insists on being loud when a whisper would have been subtly sufficient. Picture every action movie cliche you can think of, replace the soldiers with rednecks, and you'll get the picture. Still, the villainous gangsters of this movie chose a remarkable man to rally around. I'm used to James Franco's kind and wholesome portrayal of the father of a monkey in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, so his more-than-capable acting as Gator, a menacing and cruel criminal in Homefront, is jarring. As for Statham, he plays a domesticated version of every character he's ever played confidently enough, so surprisingly enough, Franco lands in what little definitively positive limelight this movie possesses.

Homefront is a familiar, pedestrian movie with an unfamiliar, redneck-laced coat of paint applied over the top. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. I would say that this movie's approach and setting make it unusual and fresh, but its clichéd tendencies do just the opposite - drag a film that could have been fresh back to familiarity. New Orleans or New York, it doesn't make any difference to Homefront, so it didn't make any difference to me. You've seen this movie before, you just don't know it yet. Still, the sense that something bad would eventually happen if nothing changed kept me watching. I don't know what gave it away; maybe the shotgun-wielding Statham on this movie's poster, come to think of it. The bottom line is that if neither of the two parties involved in this All-American cold war backs down, bad things will happen. Even if Homefront has trouble getting where it wants to go, it's going somewhere exciting - a big setpiece shootout at this film's climax that is ultimately a mixed bag. The tension leading up to it is sublime, yet it devolves into familiar simplicity once bullets start to fly. Homefront ultimately has no aspirations, a frustrating trait or lack thereof, even if it sometimes sticks a landing we've seen repeatedly.

On some levels, Statham's domestic offering doesn't behave like other Statham flicks. It's not about a war, a hostage crisis, or some terrorist organization doing terrorist stuff somewhere far from home. True to its name, Homefront is a homegrown and unabashedly overcooked action movie about a dispute between a hard-nosed veteran cop and a tough-talking group of gangsters that breaks way bad. On other levels, it remains woefully logistically familiar, like a distracting neon sign that says Look at me! I can do what everyone else can! It makes me wonder why this movie bothered to set itself in New Orleans instead of New York City or the Middle East, like every other stereotypical action romp it imitates. Statham smashes, bashes, and breaks his way through another group of nameless, faceless goons who, in this case, only wear more biker jackets than usual. To be blunt, you've seen this movie before, many, many times. Homefront is benignly domestic, but lamentably domesticated.

Homefront - 5/10

Psalm 35:1-5