Mary is a hit woman working for an organized crime family, whose life is turned around when she meets a boy during a professional hit.
Based on the trailer, I thought this was going to be John Wick but with a sexy lady. Taraji P. Henson is pretty good looking, but they didn’t use her looks here. They didn’t use her acting abilities either, I know I’ve seen her in some pretty good roles, but this one was not her best. The plot stuttered through the film along with some pretty terribly acting by actors that I KNOW are good, Danny Glover has a body of work that I’ve enjoyed but he didn’t seem to realize the camera was on for half his takes.
I really felt like they didn’t take enough takes and the editing wasn’t able to cover how poorly the film was filmed and directed. There was a distinct point where I was getting bored with the whole thing and Proud Mary pulls up in her car to park in front of a building and I shit you not there were tires squealing and brakes flaring as she gently took a corner at 15 mph and parked herself, so they obviously realized that there was a lack of action that needed to be pushed up. There’s several action scenes towards the end of the film that really broken me out of the film and shattered my suspension of disbelief: her arrival at a warehouse in which her car is shot at by 20 men with 50 round magazines and her attempt at sneaking into the warehouse after she survived the entry. Just off the top of my head, I’ll say there were about 500 shots that landed on her car as she arrived, all of them landing on her hood or in the passenger seat. None to the wheels, none to the driver seat, none to the engine block, just to the frame of the car. She sat there for half a minute while they shot round after round into her car, I swear she was being shot at by storm troopers. Then, as she’s sneaking in trying to be quiet as possible, an entirely inappropriately loud Motown cut of “Proud Mary” is playing at max volume. It was a great song, but completely wrong for the tone that they were trying to convey.
Skip it and go see something better.