Review: Fortress: Sniper’s Eye

At the end of the first “Fortress”, Bruce Willis shoots bad guy Chad Michael Murray and leaves him for dead. We pick up two weeks later as Willis finds himself having to rescue Murray’s wife (Natali Yura) from gangsters. He brings her back to the title compound in order to recover from her ordeal. Also at the bunker are Willis’ son Jesse Metcalfe who has romantically taken up with employee Kelly Greyson, as well as Greyson’s newly arrived mother and sister, and we also have returning security guy Michael Sirow and his main squeeze. Conflict arises when the clearly not dead Murray turns up to get techy Metcalfe to (force him to) help him on his latest criminal scheme.

 

Directed by Josh Sternfeld (“As Blood Runs Deep” with Nick Stahl, Kellan Lutz, Michael Sirow, and Jonathan Tucker), this cheapo 2022 sequel reunites several of the actors from the first film in a film that amazingly manages to be even worse. Screenwriter Alan Horsnail once again scripts from a story by actor Emile Hirsch and Randall Emmett, and it features so many flashbacks you’d swear you were watching a mid-90s cheapie from Full Moon Entertainment trying lazily to tie several of their franchises together. Speaking of cheap, am I the only one who thinks this ‘hi-tech’ fortress looks like it was built for about $100?

 

I don’t think I’ve seen a cast with less chemistry than this movie, despite several of them having already appeared together in the first film. None of these actors convince alongside one another. As with the previous film, one of the worst offenders is Michael Sirow, so miscast as a good guy that he spends most of the film going overboard trying to convince you he’s one of the good guys to the point where you’re expecting a heel turn that never arrives. It’s distracting, annoying, and unconvincing in the extreme. About the only thing this film has over the previous film is that villain Chad Michael Murray is a bit better this time around. He gives the least bad performance of a very bad lot here. Unlike last time, Jesse Metcalfe’s ability to give a competent performance is hampered by the obvious inconvenience of having to act alongside a tennis ball on a stick because his co-star (Bruce Willis) had health issues that dictated a reduction in hours and presumably dialogue too. The editing used to try to cover for this is woefully unconvincing, and Metcalfe definitely looks worse for it here than last time.

 

A flimsy piece of shit. That’s it. That’s my take. It’s a flimsy piece of shit and I have nothing more to say about it.

 

Rating: D-

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