Review: Proud Mary

It is a given fact that Taraji P. Henson has the sass and swagger in the world to carry Proud Mary, which shamelessly rips off John Cassavetes' Gloria and marries it to a John Wick-type of action film. Henson is most definitely the only reason Proud Mary is even remotely worth watching, but even she cannot save it from mired in mediocrity.

Henson is Mary, a hitwoman with a heart of gold, seen at the start killing a mark but sparing his young son, Danny (Jahi Di'Allo Winston), who was too busy playing video games in the next room to realise his father had been shot. Cut to a year later - Danny is a hardened street urchin, running drugs for a Russian gangster named Uncle (Xander Berkeley), who has no qualms about physically abusing the thirteen-year-old and who also happens to be the rival of Mary's boss, Benny (Danny Glover), who rescued her when she was a teenager, took her into his crime family and trained her to be the killer she is today. When Mary finds an injured Danny in an alley, she takes him into her luxurious apartment and then goes to confront Uncle and inadvertently sparks a gang war when she shoots him dead.

Even before this comes to pass, Mary has obviously been thinking twice about her life. She's keen on getting out though, naturally, hardly anyone flies out of Benny's nest. Perhaps her conflict might have been more resonant had screenwriters Steve Antin, John Stuart Newman and Christian Swegal given Henson and Glover something more to work with than the usual recycled scraps. As for the action sequences, they're rote at best with barely competent staging from director Babak Najafi, who incredibly shows less aptitude here than he displayed in his previous effort, London Has Fallen.

Proud Mary

Directed by: Babak Najafi

Written by: Steve Antin, John Stuart Newman, Christian Swegal

Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Jahi Di'Allo Winston, Billy Brown, Danny Glover, Neal McDonough, Xander Berkeley, Margaret Avery, Rade Serbedzija