Braven (2018)

There is nothing special about this movie. It may be worth watching if you just want to see a few fights and shootouts with little to no logic applied, coupled with several bad decisions that make absolutely no sense.This movie is one long, poorly directed cliche. It even comes with a snowball fight and gleeful wrestling in the snow. Toss in a bar fight and there you have it.Quiz Time: If your young child was running for his or her life and can make one phone call, who would you tell them to call? a) The weather channel b) Their mother c) The policeIf you left a large quantity of drugs in a random cabin, and the owner offered to give them back to you no questions asked, would you a) Start a shootout b) Accept the offer and move on c) Call the police and turn yourself inIf you were a police officer and your partner is outside the car shooting at an armed suspect who just killed an unarmed civilian would you a) Sit quietly inside the car for several minutes until your partner gets killed b) Get out of the car and help your partner take on the suspect c) Call the weather serviceIf you just rescued your young child from the bad guys, and later found him or her sitting safely in the back seat of a police vehicle while armed subjects were still shooting nearby, would you a) Instruct him or her to lock the doors and lay on the floor until it was safe b) Hand him or her a TEC-9 and tell them to go after the men with guns c) Open the door, pull him or her outside of the car and stand around near gun fireYou may have answered all of the questions correctly. Unfortunately, your logic (and that of every other thinking individual) played no part in the choices made in this movie.The movie's answers to the Braven quiz can be found in my review of "Castaway" under "BV Quiz Spoilers" -

I didn't like it at first. Got a lot better though, once the action started. Camera work didn't make it look very real. Momoa did a a great job, once the action started.

07/08/2018 Exactly what viewers are looking for. An excellent fast paced plot played out in a rock solid storyline, presented by a professional cast of actors. Really hard to beat in my book. Watch for yourself and then you can decide. Bon Appetit

After seeing the trailer for "Braven" it didn't inspire me to want to check it out. After seeing the ratings starting to climb on Amazon Prime Video (it was at 4 stars when I viewed the movie last week and has since dropped to 3.5) and then seeing an, at the time of my viewing, score of 6.6 on IMDB I decided to give it a fair chance. As the movie began I started to see a very tired overdone plot beginning to unfold. The, 'oh no, we need to stash our drug haul somewhere and come back for it later' routine. And of course, they stash it in what they are led to believe is a cabin that won't be in use. But, as usual, the cabin does become occupied hours later and it becomes a battle between the drug lord and his gang to get their stash back from the cabin owners.Early on we are introduced to our potential "hero", Joe Braven (a lack-luster, Jason Momoa whose acting leaves MUCH to be desired), and his wife, young daughter and aging father who seems to be having the onset of dementia. Now, if you are a fan of action movies of this sort you would immediately figure that at some point in the movie one of the four of them will eventually die (there's almost always a sacrifice of some sort in these tired plots to "beef up" our hero's rage for revenge), or possibly a hostage will be taken to start the rage. Now, I will say that I was happy to see that not all of what I was expecting to unfold did. There were a few pleasant surprises. However, those did not out-weigh the ridiculousness of the overall poor movie.THE GOOD POINTS = The female lead, Braven's wife, Stephanie (Jill Wagner) and Braven's father, Linden (Stephen Lang) gave good performances. The score was alright.THE BAD POINTS = Jason Momoa's acting. The unexplained reasoning for a drug lord to smuggle drugs from a mountaintop in the first place. The poorly run drug gang who could have ended everything in the blink of an eye. But of course that would have made for a very short movie. The stupidity of some of the decisions of the police and the mother towards the end of the movie. (Yeah, let's run through the mountain range with our young daughter in open view to possibly be taken out instead of keeping her in the safety of the police SUV) The mind boggling time frame edits. (how is it that two men are chasing each other at one moment within VERY close distance of one-another and then seconds later one of them reaches an area with enough time to stop, devise a plan, carry it out and then turn around to wait for the other one to catch up?) And then, the ending confrontation. I'm not going to go into how unbelievably stupid the final ten minutes or so of this movie was because I would have to give everything away but let's just say it defies logic on SO many levels. Seeing as how this movie only mustered up a grand total $ 312,116 at the theatrical box office, and let me add that ALL of that income came from the international market, absolutely ZERO came domestically, we will, more than likely, never see a "Braven 2", at least let's hope not!