Point Blank (2019)

Point Blank arrives as a 2019 American remake of a 2010 French thriller, retooled by director Joe Lynch into a lean ninety-minute Netflix programmer about a nurse, a wounded suspect, and a pregnant woman held as collateral. The cast is notably mixed: Anthony Mackie and Teyonah Parris opposite Frank Grillo, with Marcia Gay Harden as the corrupt lieutenant. Nobody remarks on it. Nobody is meant to. This is the ordinary arithmetic of a streaming action picture in 2019, and the film treats it as such. For that alone, a small credit is owed.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank, and the film seems content to keep it that way. Taryn, the pregnant wife, exists to be kidnapped, threatened, and eventually delivered of a baby boy in the third act, which is a function, not a character. The villainy on display is personal and venal: a corrupt cop, a gangster with a debt to collect, a flash drive that incriminates individuals. No system is indicted. No institution is asked to answer for itself. Big D, the gang leader, wants to direct a movie, which is the screenplay's one genuine joke and it lands better than most of the chases.

The result is a film with no argument to make and no sermon to deliver. It shoots, it drives, it ends. Critics were unmoved, and the aggregate scores reflect a competent thing that nobody needed. We have sat through many pictures like this, and we will sit through many more. They are not offensive. They are not instructive. They simply pass, like a Tuesday, and leave the cultural record exactly as they found it.