Proud Mary (2018)

Proud Mary arrived in January of 2018 with a poster, a trailer, and the full weight of Taraji P. Henson's charisma, which turned out to be the only load-bearing element in the structure. She plays Mary Goodwin, a Boston contract killer who shoots a man in his apartment, notices his small son in the next room, and spends the following year orbiting the boy from a distance. Babak Najafi directs the whole affair like a cable movie that wandered into a multiplex. Critics were not kind. The cinematography drew complaints. The editing drew more.

There is a casting decision here worth examining with a straight face. A Black woman occupies the center of a genre normally reserved for men with stubble and a European accent. Danny Glover and Margaret Avery fill out the margins. The film does nothing with this. No speech, no thesis, no acknowledgment. The screenplay is colorblind in the specific sense that it has no interest in race at all, which is its own kind of decision. A viewer inclined toward feminist readings can find one: Mary wants out of a crime family run by men, and she shoots her way through several of them to get there. The film never says so. It just lets her reload.

What remains is a lean B-movie that delivers gunplay and melodrama instead of instruction. No environmental sermon. No queer subplot. No body-positive messaging. No neurodivergent characters. No historical record to revise. The mob is a genre fixture, not an argument about wealth. This is a film with almost no cultural agenda and even less craft. It scores low, and it scores low honestly.