Certain Prey (2011)

First I would like to say, that I kind of like Mark Harmon, I sometimes watch NCIS, which is sort of a no brainer, but he is doing OK. Second, I would like to state that I totally love John Sandfords novels around Lucas Davenport, who is 6,5, dark haired, handsome, a ladiesman. Enter Mark Harmon as Lucas Davenport in this movie - he is what he is, tired, grey, thin, hooded eyed, heaven help us, this no Lucas Davenport at all. I read the book and I liked it. It was a compelling story, interesting and kind of sad concrning Clara Rinker, the hitwoman. But the script they drained out of this great book was dull and boring, and full of suddenly seemed forced situation that made sense in the book but were taken out of content in the movie. And there was this irritation narration, what was this all about, maybe this should create a Marlowe-feeling or something, it was cheap anyway. And this awful score which loud and exorbitant symphonic, what the heck...avoid at any cost. If would have seen first, I would never ever have read any of the books. I highly recommend ALL the books of John Sandford btw.

It is the adaptation of a book and it played out like a book, with narrations and other adaptation problems. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't that good. I thought Mark Harmon did a very good job of portraying Lucas Davenport. He really captured the world-weariness of Davenport as I had pictured him in the book, without going over the top with the character nor playing another hard charging "Gibbs" role. Davenport was an older cop who had been doing this a long time so I thought this would be a good role for Harmon. I have always liked Mark Harmon and he is just a bit older than I am. As for the other characters they seemed to be poorly cast and poorly acted. I have never liked Lola Glaudini who played Carmel (even though her body looked great). I didn't like her when she was on Criminal Minds. The guy who played Hale is nowhere near what I expected especially with the ranting about how good looking he was but was dumber than a box of lint or whatever they said. Both Athena Karkanis ...Marcy and Tatiana Maslany ...Clara Rinker were, I don't know..... poorly cast, poorly developed and poorly acted. And I don't think these were bad actors based on other roles I have seem them play. Maybe it was poor directing. But they didn't mesh with my expectations of the characters. Over all I was disappointed, expected more and will watch another NCIS marathon if I want to watch Mark Harmon act.......

It's funny but I keep hearing comments across many a board panning this Movie but the basis for said panning seems to be that Mark Harmon is not playing Gibbs-up to and including one person complaining that Lucas was a bad cross between Gibbs and DiNozzo... Now given that Rules of Prey (and therefore Lucas Davenport) was created 1989 it's kind of hard to say Lucas is a bad cross between Gibbs and DiNozzo; neither of those characters existed when John Sandford started to write.Now, if you remove your NCIS expectations, this is a good movie introducing what will hopefully be a set of TV Movies based on John Sandford's Novels. Mark Harmon is an incredibly talented actor with a lot more range than some people seem to want to credit him with. My husband, who is not a fan of NCIS, thoroughly enjoyed the movie with me.Loved Lucas, loved Marcy, and really, really loved the actor playing Carla. My husband, who normally isn't a great reader of this genre, has just grabbed my copy of Rules of Prey to read based on watching the movie so if that is any indicator of quality then this movie rocks.

Mark Harmon was great, and you could see shades of "Gibbs", so I was hoping that this would be a little like NCIS but with a different twist, but I was greatly disappointed. The storyline is a little disjointed as they start talking about a young lady who was raped and instead of just hurting the rapist she decides to kill him. She is then recruited by a crime organization to become a professional hit-man, then you are introduced to an attorney and it appears that this is the same person, it's not until later that you find out the lawyer is a different person and you have no idea how she becomes connected with the assassin. You don't know what's going on and who is who because the story jumps too much. At the end the assassin call Harmon's character and they talk and you don't know if Harmon's character is a bad guy or a good guy. Could have been a really great movie, but it missed the mark.