And Allison Janney, Who's a great actress, was ridiculously miscast here. A bony petite 60 something year old woman taking out guys half her age and twice her size in a fist fight was ridiculous. And its not a gender thing. I would make the same argument if it was Steve Buscemi in the lead.
shareAllison Janney is actually quite tall (she's 6 foot) but yeah she lacks the physicality for this kind of role. Hell, Angela Bassett is older by a couple years but she's more believable as a cop on 9-1-1.
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Janney's a great actress and I enjoy her work. Nothing against her but no.when I say twice her size I mean in shear mass. Janney's got height but she's bony and thin. she doesn't possess the muscle mass that would lead me to believe that she had years of fighting experience or could realistically deliver any kind of devastating blow. I'm all for casting great a actors but I would never watch Anthony Hopkins playing Rambo. The actor has to look the role not just act it.
shareOh brother, seriously?
She was in the CIA, true. That would give her skills like handling weapons and surveillance. It wouldn't make her defy biological constraints and turn her into an almost metahuman.
She was a bony, frail old woman pushing close to 70 and suffering from arthritis. Her bones would've snapped in the fight with the marines in the shack. I could see her getting lucky with shooting one of the guys, but there's no way she's surviving a fight with a trained marine who's in his 30s/40s. He wouldn't get knocked around like he did in that scene and would've snapped her arms or legs or neck like chicken bone.
The same ridiculous trope manifested again in the fight with her son (the beach fight between the 2 of them was farcical and as laughable as the elderly de-aged Robert DeNiro "kicking the shit outta" the grocer in The Irishman). The scene where her psychotic marine son struggled to push the axe into her chest was absurd - she'd have almost no strength to resist his attack, no matter how "badass" they made her seem, esp. given she was wounded & fatigued at that point.
Just because you are no-nonsense & tough as nails doesn't mean you get near superhuman strength that is way beyond what is possible for someone your age. Those men weren't regular Joes, THEY were rugged, tough-as-nails marines. In real life, grandma would've been toast the minute she tipped the soup on the guy's head.
Generic and cliched? Not much. I've seen about 1,000,000 movies over the past sixty-five years or so, and I've never seen anything quite like "Lou". In real life, I don't believe a woman of Janney's physique or age could kick ass on rugged ex-special forces badasses in their thirties and forties, either, or survive their blows. However, this isn't a documentary on martial arts, it's entertainment, and at that it succeeds very well.
shareGlad you enjoyed it but i disagree. Action movies like this vary in plot but they are fairly generic in execution. And casting is very important in any movie to entertainingly convey the characters. As i said Janney is a good actress but she was miscast here in a role that just isn't believable for a woman of her age and stature.
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