Dangerous (2021)

Dangerous arrives with the confidence of a film that has studied the direct-to-video revenge thriller and decided that study was sufficient. Scott Eastwood plays Dylan Forrester, a medicated psychopath who retreats to his family's private island after his brother dies, only to find the place overrun by mercenaries hunting Yamashita's Gold. There is a submarine. There is a deck gun. Mel Gibson appears as a man named Cole, which tells us most of what we need to know about the moral architecture. The whole enterprise was filmed in Canada during a pandemic and released quietly, and it carries the flat, functional competence of a thing made to fill a shelf.

For those of us who catalogue the era's social sensibilities, the picture offers a clean slate. Tyrese Gibson and Famke Janssen are present, and their presence is unremarked, which is to say the film treats them as people, not as statements. No romantic subplot strains toward inclusion. No character pauses to explain the moral of the treasure. The mercenaries want gold because gold is worth money, and the film declines to editorialize about the arrangement. Dylan's condition is a plot engine, a reason for the lithium and the violence, not an invitation to reconsider how we speak about mental health. The Japanese submarine is a treasure chest with a wartime paint job, nothing more.

This is not a defense of the film. It is a description of its temperature. Dangerous is a bad movie in the ordinary way, badly plotted and badly staged, and it earns its 30 percent on the aggregate sites without controversy. What it does not do is lecture. It has no thesis about power, no sermon about the planet, no lesson about who we ought to be. It simply wants to show a man stabbing a man near some gold, and it does so with a straight face that occasionally approaches the admirable. In a cinema landscape thick with instruction, there is something almost restful about a film with nothing to say and no intention of saying it.