REVIEW: Ambushed (2013)

  

Ambushed (in some regions called ‘Hard Rush’) is not a movie I was looking forward to.  It seemed to have come from the same people responsible for a recent Dolph/Vinnie Jones movie, ‘Blood Of Redemption’.  Now I rarely turn movies off, but I simply couldn’t suffer that movie for longer than 20 minutes or so.  This looked to be more of the same, but this time I at least made it ’till the end.  Does that mean it’s a better movie?  Probably, but could also mean I had more endurance in me this time around, for whatever reason.  There are some hot broads in this movie, that helped.  It’s also one of Dolph Lundgren’s best acting performances – for what little he appears in the movie.  Same for Randy Couture.

The plot is a mess.  Some guys want to make money from the drugs business, Randy Couture, bent cop, wants to make money from them.  Dolph Lundren, FBI, wants to gather evidence to bring in Couture, for doing that.  If that sounds halfway decent, trust me, it truly isn’t.  That’s a premise, the movie itself fails to follow up on it.  Instead, it insists on awful yet pointless ‘montages’ that look like something from Windows Movie Maker. There are giant holes in this ‘script’ where the plot was supposed to be, all of these stories go nowhere.  I could be wrong here, but I have two inclinations on why this is.  First, it’s a DTV movie, and we shouldn’t expect ‘The Departed’.  But second, and less forgivable, the ‘story’ seems to have been tailored towards who could make an extended cameo at that given time of shooting.  For example it seems like Vinnie Jones is the villain in the first half and Couture is the villain in the second half, almost like each took turns based on scheduling, at the expense of the story.

This kind of thing, aside ruining any narrative sense, is borderline false advertisement and a growing plague on the DTV industry.  Hire two or three C-Listers, who we might be marginally interested in, have them shoot for a few days then put them on the cover.  Then have have shit actors who no-one cares about eat up the actual screen time.  Which leads me to the main problem of this movie.  The two protagonists are really, really annoying.  DTV lifers, most people couldn’t be blamed for turning the movie off because of these two.  The movie could’ve survived the cheap and pointless montages and broken story problems, but it cant survive these two fucksticks.  Let me reiterate too, they’re the protagonists.  It fails, and it’s because of them.  They’re exceptionally shit actors and not 1/10th as charismatic as they believe themselves to be.  I don’t even want to waste any time talking about them any further, because there is one positive to finally sign off on.  Dolph, though appearing scarcely, gives a good performance, a side I haven’t seen of him before, actually.  Maybe it could’ve been a great turn, if it was a full role.  For that, and a ‘serviceable’ turn from Couture and Jones, also heavily MIA, it gets a 5/10 instead of a 3/10.

Once again, I feel conned.  Dolph, Randy and Vinnie Jones are on the cover.  Play the movie though, and get ready for two truly cringe worthy actors from Z-List hell trying too hard, and then some.


Review Score: 5/10