Pursuit
LIONSGATEWhere the bulk of action flicks may be overshadowed by the few blockbuster stylings that trickle out over the calendar year, it is sincerely hopeless to think how audiences would cope with peeking behind the curtain. If they did, they’d find John Cusack, who has been working on projects past Love and Mercy. Some may find that hard to believe. But more will be shocked to see Emile Hirsch appear alongside him in the Brian Skiba-directed Pursuit, a film that doesn’t really pursue anything at all. Not with much urgency anyway. The slow crawl and inevitably high-strung set pieces are all that stitches this miserable action offering together.
Hard and heavy basslines, neon reds and blues crashing together like an upturned police car and a reliance on that old “internet” thing that action writers are still trying to figure out is the triple that marks Pursuit as an unreliable piece of film. It is a stickler for the real deal of the world and can only hope the face tattoos that look very obviously like stickers and the mentions of Bitcoin this and transactions that make any sense at all. They do not. Skiba must know that. If he doesn’t then fair enough, but some of the more concerning and redundant choices don’t make a single bit of sense. They scream of a budget gone wrong, of actors too tired to care and a director too used to cracking through with unmoving direction that lacks any form of personality.
At least the characters in Pursuit reflect that dead-eyed stare found on the face of every actor within. Disguise that with bandanas that are meant to look cool, sloppy blood effects and some airsoft rifles and Skiba has quite the film on his hands. Hirsch gives a horrendous performance, worse than some of the first-timers collected to line the halls as walking targets for the big action blowouts. They are as awful as the strange bullet time sequences, which see actors fly through the air, defying the physics around them as money explodes into the sky without anything to actually cause that to happen. Every shootout is slowed down to a crawl not by clumsy actors but by foolish editing that tries to emphasise every shot. The only shot emphasised here is that of Cusack’s shot at acting, his first appearance on the screen since 2019.
Nowhere close to being as egregious and prolific as Bruce Willis, the recent works of Cusack are pause for thought and concern. It does beckon the reasonable question of “Why?”, especially considering the activism and projects Cusack works on outside of the Hollywood sphere. Not that he’s in there anymore. That bubble burst a long time ago; Pursuit is a reminder of that. He sits in what may be his backyard, rifling through the script, picking up a handful of lines to nonchalantly deliver. Even then, he provides one of the better performances available within this action-packed car crash. Skiba delivers a film afraid of its own genre, with gunfights and tension burnt down as quickly as they are built up. When push comes to shove, he and the cast just don’t have the commitment needed to make a film look good on a cheap budget. “She was afraid of you, Bubba” John Calloway (Cusack) says to his son. Audiences should be afraid of Pursuit.