Army of One (2020) - Should have been a parody

There's nothing wrong with a good 'revenge movie.' They've been around longer than I have and I'm guessing one of the first that brought the genre into the mainstream was 'Death Wish' in the seventies.  There, a man lost his family to thugs and - you guessed it - took revenge (the fatal kind).

Here we have a man and a woman fall foul of some local hillbillies in the middle of nowhere.  Let's just say the husband doesn't last long and his wife is left for dead - big mistake.  For what the locals don't realise is that she's a trained soldier who has the skills to make their lives a lot shorter.

Now, I know that to enjoy most movies you have to 'suspend your disbelief.' No one really believes aliens exist or superheroes are really flying about the place.  For reasons that I guess are my own, I can enjoy superheroes and aliens without any bother, but the sight of a very slim young woman maiming her way through a small army of giant bodybuilders is a step too far.

The bad guys - well, they're just bad.  You've never seen a more one-dimensional bunch of nondescript flesh-bags than this lot.  If you've killed a bad guy during a video game, he was probably more 'fleshed-out' than any of this lot.' And they're dumb.  And by dumb I mean painfully dumb.  They have a hundred and one times to get rid of this - seemingly indestructible - woman and don't, only to give her back the upper hand a scene or two later.

It just gets worse.  Or better - if you look at it in terms of how much fun you can take out of its absurdity.  The skinny little woman/hero puts grown me in 'sleeper' holds and then takes out two at a time.  And so on.  If she had superpowers (ala Wonder Woman or Trinity) it wouldn't be a problem 'in universe,' but she just looks so out of her depth when the stunt men have to throw themselves about the set to try and maintain the illusion that they're getting beaten up.  

This could have worked - as a parody (or just give her superpowers), but the fact that the film-makers try and pass this off as 'realistic' is too much for me to actually believe.  It becomes so stupid it's laughable.

4/10