The world captured here has cops using a CHILD as an informant, wired as he goes into the mob night club, serving as a mob courier.ĭirector William Kaufman is no Walter Hill, but his shootouts - and there are many - are competent. One character bellyaches how Albanians are always “criminals” in the movies (see “Taken,” et al). Lots of Eastern European actors overfill the supporting cast, and they have to speak English, too.
Assante, being Italian-American, doesn’t have to work at it. The conceit here is that everybody speaks English with some sort of vague Slavic accent. “Listen,” he purrs, “Whatever blows your dress up!” That big raid on the manikin factory? It’s empty, with Franco sitting in an office chair, waiting on them to show up. Rei’s “team” includes the mysterious Elena (Ravshana Kurkova) and others.Įvery time they think they’ve got the bad guys cornered, Franco outsmarts them. Jijikine has a lot of lines in this Marco Balsamo script (Balsamo is an actor, look for “Seba”), more than I can ever remember this Indiana Jones heavy having in a movie. “We are takink bayek Albania! Trust een the LAW, een Justice, een your people!” The police boss - played by Igor Jijikine (who’s played more Russians than #MoscowMitch) - lectures his troops on what they’re embarking on. Assante is “Franco,” the Italian-American mobster who runs this dirty drug empire on the muddy boot-bottom of Europe. Mandylor plays Rei, the US-educated Albanian cop with a quick trigger and a quicker temper. But it was actually filmed just across the Balkans, in Bulgaria, where all this mayhem is unleashed.
It’s set in Albania - with lovely second unit work “establishing” that locale. That’s what “The Brave” is, a cops-vs-drug-lord thriller with some heavy-duty shoot-outs, and WAY too much chatter between them. “We ALL end up making shoot-em-ups in BFE, Bulgaria!” Somebody might have turned philosophical. Maybe there was some chuckling, a few jokes about making a movie in “BFE, Bulgaria.” One can imagine those old pros Louis Mandylor (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) and Armand Assante (most recently in “The Deuce,” but he goes back to “The Lords of Flatbush” and “Private Benjamin”) sitting together in the makeup trailer for “The Brave.”
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