Blu-ray Review: Bobby Z
One of the nice things about getting random movies sent to you for review (apart from not paying for them, obviously) is that sometimes you get sent a movie you have never seen nor heard of. Case in point, The Death & Life of Bobby Z. A quick search on IMDB revealed a couple of reasonably large names (Paul Walker and Laurence Fishburne) and a plot that sounded OK. So what’s it all about?
Walker plays Tim Kearney, your average white trash loser who is in jail for a fourth time after a series of misdemeanours. Then along comes DEA agent Gruzsa (Fishburne – a man still searching for a decent Hollywood role since the Matrix), offering Kearney your typical deal that sounds too good to be true. As he bears a striking resemblance to notorious drug dealer Bobby Z (who has recently died in Thailand), Kearney has to become Z to assist the DEA with a hostage exchange. It seems that a Mexican drug cartel is holding Gruzsa’s partner and will exchange him for Z. After that, Kearney is free to run to the border and his own freedom.
Of course things never run smoothly, while in jail Kearney has inadvertently killed another inmate with a license plate (of course) and big brother on the outside wants revenge.
Naturally the exchange goes South, and Kearney is taken by the Mexicans to the house of the cartel overlord Don Huertero where he must impersonate Z and deal with the new found pressure of becoming a surrogate father to Z’s child Kit and rekindle a romance with Z’s former lover Elizabeth (Olivia Wilde).
All Kearney has to do now is escape and evade the Mexicans who are after Z, avoid the biker gang who want revenge on Kearney, kill the drug lord, get the girl and become a father in the space of ninety minutes.
Sounds silly? Well it is rather. There’s a reason why people haven’t heard of this movie, mainly because it isn’t really that good. This is a TV movie with a slightly bigger budget and some reasonable talent attached to it, but that doesn’t make it all bad.
First up, Paul Walker does a decent job of portraying Z. I do feel a bit sorry for him at times, he’s obviously keen to distance himself from the pretty-boy Brodeo persona he portrayed in the Fast and Furious movies and has done a decent enough job of that in movies like Running Scared. Here he does like a little bit like a fish out of water at times, but during the action and fight sequences he delivers a great performance (when he isn’t replaced with quite possibly the worst stuntman lookalike I have ever seen).
Fishburne turns in a nice performance as the scheming DEA agent, it’s a shame he doesn’t have more screen time but most of that is devoted to Z/Kearney and his sometimes turgid love story.
Action sequences are fairly decent, particularly a fight that develops from a standoff towards the end of the movie. It all breezes past without causing any concerns and you end up knowing you will never watch this movie again. Like I said, it would be a decent TV movie, but by no means a Hollywood blockbuster.
Audio Visual
Bobby Z is presented here in 1080p and is encoded using MPEG4, the Sony Pictures standard. You know what? It looks pretty decent.
As much of the movie takes places outdoors in Mexico on sunny days the exterior scenes look sumptuous. Helicopter pans around landscapes show a crisp and clear image that is ever so slightly softened. Ditto for the characters themselves, this isn’t a high end I Am Legend style transfer where you can see every bead of sweat on an actor’s forehead, but there is enough definition to make it stand above a regular DVD.
The visual presentation here is much like the movie, it doesn’t cause any alarm and it whisks by in a haze of pretty people and locations. By no means demo material, but there is nothing here to cause concern in the optics department.
On the sound front you have a Dolby TrueHD soundtrack that is surprisingly good. There isn’t a huge amount of action in the movie, but when it kicks in the speakers seem to wake up and realise what they are there for. In one particular scene where a lightweight plane is dropping grenades on Kearney in the desert (told you it was silly) the sub booms nicely and the rear speakers are alive with ambient noise.
The same goes for the fight towards the end of the second act and the biker confrontation on the bridge at the end of the movie. This is a far better soundtrack than many a big budget movie I have seen and while there isn’t that much to test your sound system here, what you get is pretty decent.
There is one small caveat about the soundtrack however, and that is that the dialogue tends to get a little lost in the mix. I quite often found myself leaping for the remote to turn it down after cranking up the sound to hear some of the (mainly very corny) dialogue. Net result? I found it easier at times to just turn on the subtitles.
Bonus Features
A trailer and a 12 minute featurette (both looking terrible in SD) that aren’t worth bothering with. Just your standard actors and director talking to the camera about how great the movie is, how nice it was to work with Actor A, B and C, blah blah blah.
Summing Up
The Death & Life of Bobby Z is a TV movie with Hollywood aspirations that doesn’t quite deliver. It doesn’t work as an action flick (there isn’t enough action), it’s not really a drama and you certainly can’t call it a thriller. I can’t really recommend it as a must watch movie, maybe a rental if you like the actors involved but otherwise it’s destined for the local bargain bin.
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This sounds like a made-for-TV movie . . . or a comedy.
And why is it that Fishburne cant find a good role since The Matrix ? I like him as an actor, I just have yet to see him is something that wowed me.