Once Upon a Time in Venice (2017)

Once Upon a Time in Venice arrives as a 2017 crime comedy in which Bruce Willis plays a Venice Beach private investigator whose dog is stolen by a drug lord played by Jason Momoa. The plot requires him to retrieve stolen cash, stolen cocaine, and eventually the dog. It grossed under a million dollars internationally and earned a 21 percent approval rating, a reception that spares the critic the burden of a contrarian defense. There is no thesis here. There is no message. There is a man, a dog, and a series of errands.

The cast is genuinely multiethnic, with Momoa, Wood Harris, Kal Penn, Stephanie Sigman, Adrian Martinez, and Ron Funches appearing in roles the screenplay never bothers to frame as anything other than people who happen to live in Los Angeles. No commentary attaches to any of them. This is representation without a press release, and we may note it without assigning it much credit. Elsewhere the film is content to indulge its genre's least ambitious instincts. The hero is described as good with the ladies, sleeps with a woman he was hired to locate, and the women around him function as props, prizes, or obstacles. A brief cross-dressing figure exists to subdue him for a laugh. That is the whole of its engagement with gender, and it is not a flattering one.

What remains is a caper with no interest in economics, ecology, body image, neurology, or the past. The stolen cash and the cocaine are furniture. The real estate developer with the graffiti problem is a plot device, not a symbol. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns anything of consequence. The film simply ends, having accomplished its errands, and leaves the classification desk with very little to file. A sommelier would call it a thin vintage, poured without ceremony, and would move on to the next bottle.