Click here for a video version of this review: https://youtu.be/W8VRwcfebF8
When hearing about a movie you often hear the phrase “it's so bad it’s good” meaning that even though it's an awful movie, there's something about it that makes you not entirely hate it. This brings me to Line of Duty . If the generic title wasn't a clue as to what kind of movie this is, maybe the official description will help:
A disgraced cop finds himself in a race against time to find a kidnap victim whose abductor he accidentally killed.
Aaron Eckhart stars in this, and does the best he can with a weak, basic, and run of the mill script. The real problem though is the direction, it's all over the place tonally and has some jarring moments of comedy in what sets out to be a tense race against time type movie. Imagine if every ten minutes during End of Watch Jake Gyllenhaal or Michael Pena stopped and dropped an Arnold Schwarzenegger style corny one liner. Sometimes, if it's done right in a movie, it works. In Line of Duty , it does not work.
I was rolling my eyes all the way through this, it's a by the numbers action film, but cumulatively I couldn't help but not hate it. There's so much dumb stuff in this, whether it's the completely needless newsroom and YouTuber scenes, or the newsroom gleefully talking about their “hot exclusive” even though, as the movie reminds you 10,000 times everything was being live-streamed which means anyone could watch it and so the newsroom does not in fact have an “exclusive”. Or how when the newsroom dispatches a news helicopter to cover a house fire - a house fire, by the way, that uses some of the worst CGI fire I've ever seen - there is literally only a pilot in the helicopter. No cameraman, no reporter, just a pilot noodling along minding his own business. A pilot who, when two dudes end up in the back having a fight, with them swapping places hanging over the side, never thinks to land the chopper, or even take it closer to the ground.
The movie is full of this kind of stuff. Like I said, I rolled my eyes all the way through this, but something happens in the last five minutes that made me laugh out loud and realise that they so fully commited to it being a B movie that it may have been intentional. It's like they consciously made the decision to crank the cheese up to 11 and ride this movie off a cliff while chugging a beer and giving the world two middle fingers as they crashed in a ball of flame.
By all means watch this movie, but make sure you have a giant bowl of popcorn and that your brain has been switched to low power mode.
