Made Men - It gets better

I have to say that I wasn’t enjoying ‘Made Men’ for the first act.  About the first half hour was pretty dull.  James Belushi plays Bill ‘The Mouth’ Mannuci – an informant who’s living under the ‘witness protection scheme’ in the deep south of America after he dropped his mob boss in it.  However, his happy new life doesn’t go as planned when his former associates track him down in the belief that he’s still hanging on to millions of ill-gotten money.

What follows is – effectively – the four gangsters constantly beating on him while they try and get the whereabouts of the money out of him.  My initial reaction was ‘how much punishment can one rather overweight kind of guy take?’ And take it he does.  Most people (in better physical condition) would probably have cracked (or died!) long ago, yet Belushi just keeps on coming back with one smart and defiant quip after the next.  This kind of annoyed me, but then he’s hardly a ‘sympathetic’ hero, so I guess his punishment fits his arrogance.  Finally, they stop torturing him and take him on a road trip.  Then things start getting a little better.

What starts off pretty dull changes into a kind of action/chase movie as he Belushi does his best to evade and escape his captors.  It’s hardly intellectual stuff, but there are plenty of pretty cool shoot-outs and car chases to keep us ‘mindless males’ entertained.  The plot gets a little better as more characters are introduced – all of which are completely amoral and only interested in whether they can get their hands on Belushi’s alleged loot.

Timothy Dalton is good as the Sherriff, but what he brings to the film, the ‘generic British guy’ who’s somehow been thrown in there as part of the gang seems totally over the top and in the wrong film.

Made Men will never be a classic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.  If you’re looking for a ‘no brainer’ where you’re not bothered about actually liking any of the characters, this one could be for you.  It’s one of those film that you’ll probably find on the telly late at night and just stick with it.  Probably one to watch first, but you may not bother buying it.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that