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With: Frank Grillo, Mekhi Phifer, Jaime King, Dermot Mulroney, Scott Adkins, Amaury Nolasco, Kevin Gage, JuJu Chan Szeto, Erica Peeples, Donald Cerrone, Jessica Medina, Jailyn Rae, Paul Sloan, Robert Laenen, Mary Christina Brown, Justin Furstenfeld
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Written by: Chad Law, Garry Charles, Brandon Burrows
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Directed by: Christian Sesma
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MPAA Rating: R for violence and pervasive language
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Running Time: 90
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Date: 02/16/2024
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Fight Attendants
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
The presence of Grillo and Phifer together in Christian Sesma's action movie Lights Out promised something at least passable, but it's all so sloppy and generic, that it's more likely it was just a paycheck for them.
Ex-soldier Michael 'Duffy' Duffield (Frank Grillo) gets off of a bus in Los Angeles and enters a bar. He joins a card game and starts winning big, prompting the other players to question his honesty, and leading to a bar fight. Duffy dispatches the others easily, and the altercation is witnessed by Max (Mekhi Phifer). Max offers Duffy a way to make a lot more money, using his skills in an illegal street fighting ring. In addition, Max owes money to a crime boss, Sage (Dermot Mulroney), so this can help them both.
Unfortunately, Sage and his partner, crooked cop Ellen Ridgeway (Jaime King), are also in debt, and are searching for money that a low-level criminal stole and hid in Max's sister Rachel's (Erica Peeples) house, unbeknownst to her. Coincidentally, Duffy happens to be staying at Rachel's. Once Max and Duffy realize what a fix they found themselves in, they decide to put an end to it for good.
Just about every single little thing in Lights Out has been used before, from the street fighting, to the hero doing little repairs in the sister's house, to the villain saying "tick-tock, tick-tock," to indicate that time is running out. (Even the title is borrowed from a far superior 2016 horror movie.) During the fight scenes, whenever Duffy breaks a skull or some bones, the movie uses an "x-ray" technique — borrowed from 1970s Sonny Chiba action movies — to show it.
Even if all we had were the fight scenes, that might have been enough, but director Sesma (of the abysmally bad Every Last One of Them and other duds) mangles them with jittery shaky-cam cinematography and erratic editing, sucking the life and suspense out of them.
That said, Lights Out isn't quite as bad as some of Sesma's other work, simply because of weird touches like King's bottle-blonde, curly hairdo, or the fact that nearly every single character in the movie is in debt to someone else (which could be some kind of commentary on American society). It could be an acceptable time-waster for viewers of a certain taste, but others will want to look elsewhere for prime pugilism.
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