Vanquish movie review & film summary (2021)

The aforementioned heroine is Victoria (Ruby Rose) and as she enters the picture, she’s arriving at her job providing evening care for Damon (Morgan Freeman—yes, Morgan Freeman), a retired and wheelchair-bound cop in his palatial estate with her adorable moppet daughter Lily (Juju Journey Brener) in tow. Lily, it turns out, is ill and Victoria confesses to Damon that she cannot possibly afford the necessary treatment. Damon magnanimously offers to pay for the treatment but he will require a service. As his digs probably suggest, Damon was a corrupt cop engaged in all sorts of illicit deals around town. And in the wake of a recent double cross, he decides to pull his money from five associates around town and asks Victoria to put her own former skill set—she once worked with her late brother as a drug courier for the Russian mob—to use by making the pickups over the course of that night. At first, Victoria refuses—she has left that life behind and such—but when it turns out that Lily has vanished, and Damon won’t return her until the job is done, she reluctantly agrees.

Any hopes that this will just be a quiet and nondescript series of pickups and drop-offs pretty much goes out the window when Victoria arrives at the first destination, recognizes the criminal she is collecting from as being the guy who killed her brother, and slaughters him and a roomful of his minions. (She also helps a sex worker escape, so I guess the karmic scales are even.) From there, things go downhill as each new trip brings an encounter with allegedly colorful criminals (including one who clearly thinks he’s playing Alfred Molina in “Boogie Nights” and greets Victoria with the deathless line “I hear you killed more people than Quentin Tarantino. Mint julep?”) that ends in either a fight scene, gunplay, or a chase before heading back to Damon’s place for yet another enigmatic conversation (while never just going from room to room in search of her daughter). Meanwhile, Victoria’s activities capture the attention of an array of crooked cops, feds, and government agents—at least one of whom actually gets to say that a piece of information is “above your pay grade”—who all try to stop her in equally ineffectual ways.

As you may have surmised by this point, “Vanquish” is a very bad movie. But more than that, it’s a supremely lazy one—the kind that almost makes the DTV drivel that Steven Seagal has been churning out for the last couple of decades seem focused and committed by comparison. To describe the characters and the narrative as being “paper-thin” would be an insult to your average ream of copier feed and at least that is guaranteed to have a higher brightness rating than the murky cinematography on display throughout. Of course, one does not watch a film like “Vanquish” for those particular qualities, but they actually come off better when compared to the dreadful action beats that are listless as can be throughout. The only thing that’s interesting about them—and the whole movie, by extension—is that the film is oddly bereft of extras throughout. Strip clubs, freeways—you name a location and it is weirdly devoid of anybody other than the specific characters necessary to move that particular scene along. Hell, “Swimming to Cambodia” had more extras than can be found here—not to mention better fight choreography.