Review: Renny Harlin’s The Misfits Is, for Better and Worse, a Blast from the Past

Renny Harlin’s The Misfits begins with an onslaught of cheeky exposition, introducing us to the titular group of criminals, latter-day Robin Hoods who specialize in stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Their ringleader is master of disguise Ringo (Nick Cannon), who will go on to incessantly narrate the film, almost as if he were pitching it to a board of investors. Alongside him are explosives expert Wick (Mike Angelo), martial arts ass-kicker Violet (Jamie Chung), enigmatic techie Prince (Rami Jaber), and Peace Corps veteran Hope (Hermione Corfield). For their latest assignment, which involves stealing a cache of gold from the Muslim Brotherhood hidden within a Middle Eastern prison, they must solicit the services of Hope’s father, legendary thief and recent parolee Richard Pace (Pierce Brosnan).

For his umpteenth iteration of the suave, globe-trotting man of action, Brosnan can barely muster up the energy to wheeze out his lines. And yet he’s somehow still able to effortlessly flash the mischievous glint that made him so much fun to watch in his prime as James Bond and Remington Steele in the ’80s. The film, then, sets itself up as an interrogation of a man reckoning with the world leaving him behind, particularly in a scene when Pace wakes up unfulfilled from a mechanical 007-esque tryst with an unknown woman in a Dubai hotel room, leading to his decision to put aside his selfish needs and take on the Misfits’ job. But any line of inquiry starts and ends there, with the filmmakers instantly letting Pace off the hook as he proceeds to lecherously seduce the much-younger Violet, and in front of his own daughter.

Ultimately, The Misfits ends up closer in tone to Brett Ratner’s After the Sunset than John McTiernan’s savvy The Thomas Crown Affair, keeping the narrative simple and the stakes practically nonexistent. With the Misfits always five steps ahead of anybody on their tail, including a shady businessman named Schultz played by a barely there Tim Roth, there’s never any doubt that our heroes will pull off the heist and prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from funding whatever evil plot they had planned. It all amounts to the equivalent of watching a cast vacation, with some breezy fight sequences and car chases (mercifully devoid of much CGI) interrupting the group’s poolside planning sessions. Meanwhile, the motives of the terrorist group go unexplored (we’re never even adequately introduced to any of its members), for fear of complicating the film’s straightforward moralistic worldview.

Of course, such flimsy contextual architecture isn’t surprising given that Harlin’s action extravaganzas hardly issue ringing calls for deep thought. After the better part of a decade spent directing anonymous Chinese productions, he’s simply aiming to recapture his ’90s heyday, during which he brought his flashy commercial instincts to propulsive entertainments like Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Deep Blue Sea. The Misfits seems unearthed from the same era, and compared to the self-righteousness of many a modern superhero film and the increasingly lugubrious Fast and Furious series, this flighty film is practically refreshing, even as it remains defiantly ignorant of the world in which it exists. In terms of mindless escapism, where all that’s needed to solve an extremely contentious geopolitical situation is a group of plucky thieves, it’s almost tempting to bask in the film’s sun.