Proud Mary

There are a lot of things wrong with "Proud Mary." A lot. Most egregious amongst these problems is the utter wasting of Taraji P. Henson in this role. The actress has shown herself more than capable of delivering a fantastic performance, which would suggest that this type of flick would allow her to soar. But said soaring does not occur anywhere near "Proud Mary." It's bad.

Some movies get hampered by complexity, taking a strong central premise and miring it in plot convolutions. Luckily, that's not one of "Proud Mary's" multitude of ailments. Mary is a hitwoman. She kills people, and she's good at it. Years after Mary completed a hit that left an unknown child orphaned, she runs into the boy again. This time, she intends to do right by the boy.

You can practically hear the film executives pitching "Proud Mary" before the film even gets started:

EXEC #1: What if "Shaft" but with a lady.
EXEC #2: Oh, I like that, but what if also "John Wick"?
EXEC #1: Even better. I think we kind of did that with "Atomic Blonde," so how about this time, we don't keep any of the style.
EXEC #2: Perfect.

On paper, "Proud Mary" makes complete sense. In the last few years, we have been gifted a slew of action flicks that do more than just fights and explosions, and audiences have responded with loads of dollars. But every good idea will always have its crappy brethren. In the case of "Proud Mary," it seems that no one was told that no effort was going to be expended on an engaging story or character development. Not a single person comes away from this movie looking good, Danny Glover can all but be seen walking to the bank to cash his paycheck, and Taraji P. Henson is struggling to gurgle up every piece of the exposition-laden, poorly written script.

"You just don't get it," you shout at your computer screen, "'Proud Mary' is taking its influence from B-movies and grindhouse Blaxploitation fare." I'll buy that for a second until you consider that those flicks from the old guard were made on the cheap and had the intention of still being a coherent movie. "Proud Mary" props up B-movie creds as a crutch, because it has no intention to comment on those trappings, nor engage with them fully.

The Blu-ray release is about as half-assed as the film itself. The only features to be seen are three five-minute featurettes that are essentially canned marketing material that has already been released on YouTube, back when the movie was being promoted. There is nothing here to entice you to buy the Blu-ray unless you were inexplicably infatuated with this misfire of an action movie. You're best to act like the majority of the film-going public and just pretend "Proud Mary" never happened. I imagine that's what Taraji P. Henson is doing.

"Proud Mary"
Blu-ray + Digital HD
$19.96
http://www.sonypictures.com/