Written by Chris Morgan
You look at the Blu-ray cover for Survivor and you see Pierce Brosnan and Milla Jovovich holding guns, with a tagline letting you know that Brosnan’s latest target is now chasing him. It looks like it could be a solid cat-and-mouse thriller. Indeed, there are parts of the movie where that is true, but the issue is that it makes up far too little of the movie.
Jovovich plays a woman named Kate Abbott, a Foreign Services Officer from America who has been brought to London to try and thwart terrorist attacks. Brosnan plays an assassin who is brought in to make sure a terrorist attack goes off without a hitch. Kate ends up a suspect in some crimes and deaths, so she ends up on the run, with Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, and the British authorities after her. So the notion of Jovovich chasing Brosnan is actually fairly inapt. She mostly just runs.
Now, those moments are pretty well done. There are some good chases and action scenes. This is where the movie succeeds. Everything else is, at best, a middling slog. This is a film tone deaf enough to think to itself, “It’s cool to use footage of the World Trade Center on 9/11 for some banal, unnecessary backstory, right?” The plotting is by the books, and the movie doesn’t seem particularly enthused about getting its story across. It feels almost perfunctory, at least in terms of the actors.
This movie should have been Brosnan and Jovovich running around trying to kill each other. That movie would have been good. Instead, Survivor ends up being a merely decent affair. If you are one of those people who just like to throw on a boilerplate action movie and kick back, you probably won’t be disappointed by this movie. Otherwise, there are a lot of better options, including a good amount of Brosnan and Jovovich movies. These two have made their fair share of action movies, and they know what they are doing. They may just be the only ones.
The also has a making of featurette and some deleted scenes. However, anything that couldn’t make the cut for this movie isn’t really worth watching.
Survivor is available on Blu-ray and DVD on June 23.
