
Michael ‘Duffy’ Duffield (Frank Grillo, King of Killers, One Day as a Lion), once a soldier, drowns in PTSD as a drifter on the move. He begins the movie by getting off a bus, and less than five minutes after he shows up in the footage, he is in a card game and accused of cheating. People notice how easily Duffy (Mekhi Phifer, Divergent, Truth Be Told) is able to wipe the other competitors and clip their money strategized against him.
Max has just got out of jail and is desperate to earn some money. He witnesses Duffy’s fighting skills and gets the brilliant idea to promote underground fights through Fosco (Amaury Nolasco, Armored, A Good Day to Die Hard). Duffy also needs a little cash, but there is no such complication to ensure that.
While still a free man, Max had a weighty debt to a man called Sage (Dermot Mulroney, The Inhabitant, Breakwater) which he intended to settle along with some interest. There is never a good reason to deal with someone like Sage and now he has sleeping partners who are easily corruptible cops, such as Detective Ridgway (Jaime King, The Resurrection of Charles Manson, My Bloody Valentine) and her partner Detective Kincaid (Paul Sloan, Paydirt, Every Last One of Them).
The film Lights Out directed by Christian Sesma and written by Chad Law, Garry Charles, and Brandon Burrows, involves people who have experience in making such movies. Thus, it is not a shock that Sage operates an elite fight club, and Duffy starts to put away the best that he has which is Carter (Donald Cerrone, Terror on the Prairie, 3 Days in Malay), and comes down to settle Max’s debt. It’s also not shocking that Duffy pursues romance with Max’s sister Rachael (Erica Peeples, Lunar Lockdown, True to the Game) whose previous partner has managed to place her on Sage and Ridgway’s bad side. And thus, that also creates the setting for the last battle of Lights Out.
A great cast and continuous appearances from Mulroney, Grillo, and Phifer instead of throwing a nobody to carry the film like many others tend to do makes Light Out interesting. The same, however, cannot be said for Scott Adkins (Seized, Re-Kill), who first features in Grillo’s dream sequences before making a final appearance toward the end in a shootout scene against a crooked SWAT member.
The film assumes its distinctiveness in the fighting scenes, which are coordinated by Luke LaFontaine (The Sand, White Elephant), who is also credited with creating some of the punches and kicks in the film’s brief yet effective fights. Having weak spots in the film logically suggests a conclusion based on a shootout, but it is not the case with Lights Out the film seems to lose out in this department due to Adkin’s presence, as brawls seem more appropriate. That he does most of his work in the film with a gun, aimed at underground fighting, is such a waste.
The gimmick with the ‘Animated X-ray’ feature of the game that had us watch moving images of bones breaking, organs bursting, etc. feels like just that. Perhaps if it were not so clearly a screengrab from the newest Mortal Kombat, I would have had a better impression of it. But after years of having seen that by the likes of Sonny Chiba, Jet Li, Tony Jaa, and others, it takes more than a silly representation to impress most fans.
All in all, Lights Out is quite a good movie, although rather predictable. Surely it is not anything to write home about, but still, some decent actors mouthing decent lines which is a pleasant surprise in this genre makes the action between the action scenes much more bearable. And that changes quite a bit than what you would expect.
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