Marauders (2016)

Steven C. Miller's Marauders arrives with the grim efficiency of a direct-to-video procedural, which is precisely what it is. Four masked men rob a Cincinnati bank, execute a manager, and donate the proceeds to a charity mission, and a suicidal FBI agent named Montgomery spends the rest of the running time chasing the pattern. Bruce Willis glowers as the bank's chief executive. Dave Bautista stands around. The plot eventually discloses a conspiracy involving a falsified military operation, a betrayed Army Ranger unit, and a senator's safe deposit box. It is competent, convoluted, and entirely content to be so.

The film's social temperature is low, and it seems untroubled by that fact. The cast includes a handful of women and minority actors in supporting roles, among them Lydia Hull as a fellow agent and Texas Battle as the wronged Ranger, but the film never makes a talking point of any of it. They are simply present, doing their jobs. The single item that gestures toward a modern sensibility is a set of photographs suggesting an affair between the bank president and a senator. Those photographs serve as leverage and scandal, a bargaining chip in a plot about blackmail. There is no interest in the men themselves, only in what the pictures can buy.

The villain is a corrupt chief executive, and the stolen money moves through the vaults of a powerful institution, so the film brushes against a critique of concentrated wealth. It never commits. The rot is personal and criminal, the work of one bad man and his accomplices, and the resolution is a knife in a Tijuana restaurant. Late in the film, Montgomery lectures a grieving accomplice about the pointlessness of revenge and the suffering his crusade has caused. It is a brief sermon, delivered without conviction, and then the film moves on to the stabbing. Marauders wants to be a taut thriller about institutional corruption. It settles for being a taut thriller about a few corrupt individuals, which is a smaller and less fashionable thing.