★½
“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?”
This is a question posed by the bad guy (Fears) towards the end of this, and of course, he provides the usual explanation in response: “It’s doing the same thing, expecting different results.” After watching this, I would choose to adjust it slightly. A valid definition of insanity is making the same movie, and expecting different results. Because it is, more or less, what Rankins has done here: it’s a remake of his own movie from fourteen years ago, Jack Squad. Now, there’s something to be said for that. I mean, Cecil B. DeMille did The Ten Commandants twice, while directors from Hitchcock to Michael Haneke have remade their own films.
The difference is, they were kinda busy. For instance, Hitchcock directed twenty-five features between his two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Since the original Jack Squad in 2009, Rankins has made just one feature: Angry Kelly in 2014. Did he not manage to come up with more than one original idea in a decade and a half? And that count is presuming Angry Kelly is not about a man who is annoyed because he was drugged and robbed by a trio of women. I’ve not seen it, I can’t say. Here, we get a little variation at the start, where the original Jack Squad get hunted down, and a bit at the end, where there’s dissension in the ranks over hidden money.
In the middle though? It’s a blatant re-make. Three young women decide to make money by drugging and robbing men. This goes wrong, when one of the targets is a courier for a violent drug boss, carrying a large sum of cash. They make the ill-advised decision to hold onto the money, a choice which brings them into the crosshairs of its real owner. If anything, we have even less going on this time. It’s a good half-hour before the new trio, of Cassie (Green), Nikki (Alexander) and Cam (Lynn) put their scheme into action. I guess there is at least some altruism, the goal – at least initially, before the designer shopping kicks in – being to cover the medical bills run up by one of the trio’s mother.
The overwhelming sense of deja vu here is what knocks the overall rating here down below the original. I mean, the three characters feel almost like bad photocopies of their predecessors. There’s one who has qualms about the whole concept, while another refuses to give it up at any cost. It’s likely a little more technically competent, though at basically two hours long, is still painfully over-long. There’s a weird subplot where one of the women has a mentally challenged brother, who wants to be a baseball pitcher. This does eventually show relevance, though the way it does, might have you wishing they hadn’t bothered. If we don’t get Jack Squad 3 until 2037, I am completely fine with that.
Dir: Simuel Denell Rankins
Star: DeShon Green, Samiah Alexander, Tinesha Lynn, Gregory J. Fears


The title here seems quite deliberately a nod towards Taken, which similarly has an ex-government operative chewing up and spitting out bad guys, after they make the fatal mistake of abducting the operative’s child. In this case, it’s CIA operative Angela (Bozeman), who lost her husband Jason in murky circumstances, but subsequently put away Dmitri (Weber), the criminal mastermind responsible. Now, six years later, she can get on with living her life, bringing up son Jason Jr. (Cheatham), and hanging out with fellow agent Byron, who seems a possible husband replacement. Well, until Dmitri escapes from prison and starts killing off everyone he considers responsible for putting him behind bars.
After the impressive surprise which was
When the best part of a movie is the opening credits, we have a problem. That’s the case here, with an 007-influenced montage that feels as if it cost more than the entire rest of the film to put together. However, by that point, the movie was already on thin ice, because the volume of the music was roughly three times that of dialogue in the pre-credit scene. Lunging repeatedly for the button on the remote is always a red flag for any indie movie, and proved accurate here. The same goes for the gratuitous name-checking of much better black heroines, such as
At the age of fifteen, Madison Michaels saw her prostitute mother beaten and killed by Renegade (Cross), a vicious local pimp. His homicide goes unpunished. Ten years later, Madison (Linton) is a counsellor, trying to help drug addicts and hookers get off the streets. She discovers that Renegade is still abusing women, and gets no help from the police, with Detective Straker (Williams) saying he can do nothing based on her hearsay. Against the advice of her friends and sister Lydia (Jeffries), Madison hatches a plan to take the pimp down, and clean the streets of thus piece of scum. Naturally, it doesn’t initially go quite as planned, with the trap set for Renegade backfiring, followed by betrayal from an unexpected direction.
There are times when I can look at a failure of a movie, and kinda see how the various elements could have been arranged to better effect. That’s the case here, where a poverty-row, Spanish-language (but made in Texas) production about rape, revenge and narcos, could potentially have worked. Except, it absolutely doesn’t. It’s the story of Carla Mendoza (Verastegui), who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, working for her boss, Pedro Camargo (Palomo), blissfully unaware he is a cartel leader. As a result, she’s arrested, and ends up spending seven years in prison, while daughter Nina is taken care by her grandmother.
Not to be confused with the clearly different
Tubi TV has become a goldmine of obscure, weird and,
We begin with the usual disclaimer for films of this kind: middle-aged white guys like me are not the target audience. However, I think it’s fair to say that concepts like story-telling and character development are not limited to any particular race, colour or creed, so I still feel equipped to offer an opinion on these aspects. Though, actually, what felt like it worked best here was its strong sense of place. I’ve never been to the projects in Jamaica, New York (though Chris grew up elsewhere in the same borough of Queens). But the film does a good job of showing you that environment; it certainly works better than the (largely token) efforts to convince you some scenes take place in Miami, or even Moscow.
The latest stop in our ongoing tour of female-driven urban crime movies brings us to the nation’s capital in Washington, where the police are celebrating just having taken down a leading light in the city’s organized crime industry. Now, they set their sights on a new target: the gang led by Racine Robinson (Vaughan) and her two daughters, Kat (Crosby) and Candy (Bethea). These might prove a tougher nut to crack, since the Robinson crew have a harsh, zero tolerance policy to anyone who messes with them in the slightest, yet also gathered local support during the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, Racine is so popular in the neighbourhood, a run for political office is not out of the question. However, she has rivals, who have more than a passing interest in seeing her taken out of the picture – albeit for very different reasons, in order to make room for them to rise up.