Sometimes the publicity for a film can be a little bit misleading. On the advertising for the film Precious Cargo, Bruce Willis is front and (sometimes) centre on the posters and prominently featured in the trailers. So it could be construed as something of a surprise to learn that he has only about fifteen minutes of screen time and is not the lead actor in the movie. Having said that, it doesn’t make it a bad movie, far from it.
Jack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) leads a well organised team of con artists. They use their guile and skill to pull off a variety of tricky jobs which only lead to gunfire when absolutely necessary. The arrival of Karen (Claire Forlani), his ex wife, spells trouble for the team. She is pregnant with his child and is in a bit of trouble. She needs their help to retrieve a consignment of diamonds in order to save her skill. They reluctantly agree to take it on in order to get rid of her. Of course, other factors are at play with Eddie (Bruce Willis) looking for Karen and willing to do just about anything to get even.
The story is one that is familiar to anyone who has watched a number of heist films. It follows the same story beats, with action interludes to keep the audience engaged. It is very slickly made with enough going on to entertain for the entire running time. It doesn’t hurt that the lead characters are interesting enough to carry you along. They work well together as a team and there are a couple of good performances from Gosselaar as the main lead and Forlani as his ex wife. There is a genuine sense of tension between them that actually feels natural. Like they actually had some history.
As noted before, Bruce Willis has limited time on screen. It was good to see that this wasn’t one of those performances that he phoned in as has been the case in so many films over the last couple of years. He is increasingly popping up in these roles with varying degrees of success. It takes a good director to get a performance out of him these days and this is true of Precious Cargo.
The only aspect that didn’t really work was in the variety of the set pieces. They had a tendency to follow a set plan in their execution. There is one set piece that is a boat chase. The leads escape, pursued by the bad guys who are taken down one at a time. All good and pretty well done to be fair. Later the set piece is pretty much recreated right down to the way the nameless evil guys are dispatched. The difference being the fact that they are using trucks rather than boats. I realise budgets are tight on films but this seemed like a wasted opportunity to try something a little different.
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