The Rookies – It Made Me Want To Travel To Budapest, Is That Enough? (Early Review)

While watching The Rookies, one can’t help but wonder how everything went so wrong for Milla Jovovich. She’s the most internationally renowned member of the cast and seemed to have promise during the 1990s. Though playing Leeloo in The Fifth Element was surely not the most demanding task, she had a certain fresh-faced energy that seems to have been sucked out of her by the dumb blockbusters that she keeps appearing in. It seems like Resident Evil permanently derailed her and she’s stuck making throwaway action movies that are completely forgettable. This must have been what led her to get involved in this project.

Surely Jovovich didn’t read through the fairly formulaic script and think that this was going to be award winning material. The Rookies saw her play Agent Bruce, the leader of the Order of the Phantom Knighthood, an organisation tasked to defeat terrorism in all corners of the world. Her current mission involves hiring social media star Zhao Feng (Wang) to travel to Budapest and impersonate Liam Wonder (David Lee McInnis), a billionaire who wants to destroy the world by buying a special weapon. Feng can prevent this transaction from occurring by stealing the Holy Grail and presenting it to the powerful Mr. X (Keresztes Tamás) in exchange for the weapon. 

Having just watched, writing that above plot description was admittedly a struggle. So often we criticise exposition in cinema but The Rookies does not tell viewers nearly enough about what is occurring on screen. Instead, the film merely bombards with a sensory overload and in the hopes of distracting from its obvious plot holes. One minute the film could be in China and before being taken on a guided tour of the sights in Budapest the next. There just isn’t enough substance for all of the style to hang on. These may sound like silly complaints as the film isn’t aiming to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay but the film should at least have a story that would vaguely hold together thus giving viewers something to hang onto amidst the flurry of text bubbles that pop up in every scene involving social media. 

One can’t help but also question the need to set The Rookies in Budapest. The film bombards viewers with a 1950s-style montage of parts of the city that doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose. It’s like the filmmakers wedged a brief tourism commercial into a finished film. That being said, it’s not like Budapest isn’t a beautiful city. Viewers will surely end up dreaming of going on a vacation there so that could be seen as a positive. At the same time, the travelogue scenes only reinforced the flimsiness of the story.

In the end, it’s nice to see so many international productions these days, It’s just a shame that it could not have displayed slightly more ambition. We are losing blockbusters that have a spark of originality behind them it seems like. Let’s hope that future Jovovich action movies are more daring. Maybe she should even move into a different genre at some point?

still courtesy of Shout Studios

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Zita Short

I am passionate about screwball comedies from the 1930s and certain actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I’ll aim to review new Netflix releases and write features, so expect a lot of romantic comedies and cult favourites.