Renny Harlin’s Retrograde, Racist Heist Movie The Misfits Barely Qualifies as a Movie at All

In the years that followed the critical and box office failure of pirate adventure film Cutthroat Island back in 1995—leading to a steady, years-long decline in the U.S.—director Renny Harlin eventually whisked himself away to China in the mid-2010s. It was there Harlin found himself far more embraced than in the U.S., where returns had greatly diminished and Golden Raspberry Awards nominations had accrued (and it didn’t help that Cutthroat Island had essentially bankrupted an entire studio). Thus, following his direction of the Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville film Skiptrace in 2016—a Chinese co-production—the Finnish filmmaker of successful blockbuster action films like Die Hard 2 and Deep Blue Sea made the move east permanent, even founding his own company in China. His second film after moving, videogame adaptation Legend of the Ancient Sword, didn’t do so hot; the film after that, Bodies at Rest, however, holds an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. But his newest film, The Misfits—his first American production since 2014’s The Legend of Hercules—is no 80-percenter on Rotten Tomatoes. Quite the opposite: It feels like the feature film adaptation of a stock photo.

The Misfits, starring Pierce Brosnan and Nick Cannon, is airless, pointless and only passably made; an amalgamation of the most tired clichés of heist movies, executed in the emptiest way possible. Coming from a capable director, it feels like there was some other reason for making this film. Like it was a front for something—a money-laundering scheme. It pains me to be so cruel to a film, but it would be far less easy if it wasn’t also wildly racially insensitive. The film operates off a script from co-writers Robert Henny and Kurt Wimmer, who seem to be writing as if we’re in an entirely different era, back when doing exaggerated Middle Eastern accents and making jokes about all Muslim people being named “Mohammed” was still seen as kosher.

The film’s plot follows an unorthodox band of criminals known as the Misfits…but this name only rings true to the group’s leader, Ringo (Cannon) who, during the seven-minute introductory narration, goes to great lengths to explain that the other members of the team don’t necessarily agree with this name. The Misfits—who, alongside Ringo, include ass-kicking girl-power broad Violet (Jamie Chung) and pyrotechnic Wick (Mike Angelo)—become aligned with a master thief known as Richard Pace (Brosnan, looking hot). Pace recently escaped from a prison, one of many run by a man named Schultz (Tim Roth, also looking hot), who does business with an extremist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Misfits want to partner with Pace to steal the gold currently hoarded by Schultz and the Muslim Brotherhood in one of Schultz’s Middle East prisons. Not so they can keep the gold for themselves necessarily, but so they can get it out of the hands of terrorists. It felt like we left that sort of “righteous Westerners vs. evil Muslim terrorists” type of storyline to the annals of the past where it belongs, but The Misfits either wants to bring back the good old days, or doesn’t really care what it’s doing or the message it’s sending one way or the other.

Eventually Pace reluctantly agrees to “do the right thing” and steal the gold with the Misfits. This is despite not being guaranteed any of the riches, in order to impress his estranged, humanitarian daughter Hope (Hermione Corfield)—because of course he has an estranged daughter. Hope literally says, out loud, “I have trouble trusting men. Daddy issues,” during a conversation between the two of them. When she said this, I laughed out loud. Not simply because it was funny (it was) or because it was so expected (again, it was), but out of perverse acceptance of the pain I was in.