Proud Mary (2018)

  I was looking forward to this movie, despite the utter lack of marketing and the January release date.  I love hitman movies and Taraji P. Henson.  Sadly, this is not a very good film.

Mary (Taraji P. Henson) is an enforcer for a crime family but is tired of the unrelenting violence.  She takes a young delivery boy named Danny (Jahi Di'Allo Winston) in after he is hurt by his drug dealer boss (Xander Berkeley) but a rash act of vengeance on her part puts her squarely into the crosshairs of her own people.

This had a talented cast and was very stylish in some ways, but it seemed really unsure of what kind of movie it wanted to be.  The trailers and poster made it seem like it was reaching back to Jackie Brown or real blaxploitation films from the 70s but then it seemed to veer into generic story tropes about awkwardly raising a kid and the two rival gang vying for territory.  I was hoping for Man on Fire and I got Romeo Must Die instead.  Walking out of the theater, I was left with two questions:  how fucking dumb is that kid to immediately trust a strange woman who essentially just kidnapped him off the street?

This is Billy Brown.  Does he not look just like a young Danny Glover?!  I couldn't get over it.

Anyway, this was my first new movie of 2018 and I confess to being pretty disappointed by it.  I think I was hoping for it to be kind of a continuation of the badass assassin Henson played in Smokin' Aces and it wasn't.