He had just sold his second café, Liar Liar, which gave him the means to design a dream shop that could showcase many coffees every day. She even makes the film’s poorly choreographed climactic shoot-out look good just by strutting confidently down a couple of hallways, and looking ferocious when she pulls the trigger.Nolan Hirte began to build his café Proud Mary in Melbourne in 2009, right about the time the rest of the world was lashing down every asset and bit of property before the global financial tsunami swept through. She’s got enough sheer presence that she makes you believe she’s a real person no matter what she’s doing, everything from scolding Danny (“Language!”) to walking down a hallway and killing a bunch of anonymous eastern European bad guys. Proud Mary only comes to life at its close, when its heroine finally gets to look like the badass that her justly adoring fanbase want her to be. Henson is also rarely given the attention she deserves. It robs Glover, and the film, of one of their only highlights. But no, putting Glover in front of an over-exposed, naturally lit window just feels like a result of imaginative ineptitude since this sequence is one of the only ones that is paced well enough to be effectively moody. This creative decision would at least make sense if we weren’t supposed to know, in this moment, what Benny was feeling. At this point, it becomes comically impossible to make out the expressions on Glover’s face. At one point, Glover stands directly in front of a window during harsh day-time sunlight. Too bad it’s almost impossible to appreciate his performance during these darkly-lensed sequences. Even Glover, a formerly great leading man who has delivered too many unworthy performances recently, is at his peak in two later scenes that, on paper, are almost rather good. Najafi and his colleagues’ biggest mistake was not putting the camera down long enough to highlight Henson, and her equally talented co-lead’s performances. ![]() And taking care of Danny is at least a part-time job. Mary wants to keep her involvement with Uncle’s death a secret from Benny, but his biological son Tom (How to Get Away with Murder’s Billy Brown) wants to go to war. Unfortunately for Mary, Uncle was protected by the Russian mafia-esque rivals of her surrogate gangster dad Benny (Danny Glover). A year later, Mary rescues Danny from a life of crime by taking out his cartoonishly evil drug dealer boss Uncle (Xander Berkeley). Mary feels bad after she kills an anonymous guy, and makes an orphan out of his son Danny (Jahi Di’Allo Winston). Then the plot kicks in, and things get a lot worse before they get marginally better. You can’t help but feel like you’re watching a parody rather than a sincere tribute to female-led blaxploitation films like Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones or Coffy. But the mood is ruined by sloppy direction and an offbeat rhythm. The Temptations’ Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone blares. It’s a poorly paced attempt to introduce the film with a retro bent, with no-nonsense mobster assassin Mary (Henson) dressing up and arming herself before heading out to kill an anonymous mark. ![]() Proud Mary starts going downhill slowly during an opening credits sequence that hints at a fun time that director Babak Najafi (London Has Fallen), and the film’s three credited screenwriters almost never deliver.
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