Close Range

 A generic name for a fairly generic movie. For those who keep an eye on modern, low-budget action, it stars Scott Adkins and is directed by Isaac Florentine. For those who don't know them, it's got a poster with a giant gruff guy with a gun towering over some hoodlums. There's a big sniper scope painted behind him, a smaller explosion sending a car flying (which never happens in the movie) and a helicopter in the background (which never makes an appearance).

 That's fine, it's aspirational; It feels like a movie that would have included explosions and helicopters, if it had the money to put them in. Truth-ish in advertising. Unless you expected Adkins to actually be giant-sized, swatting helicopters out of the sky and kaiju-ing his way through a bunch of gunmen; I can't really help you if that's what you got out of that poster, but I agree that would have been more interesting.

 The big (not literally) gruff guy in the poster is Colt McReady (Adkins), an ex-soldier badass who left the forces after disobeying dishonourable orders, but not before assaulting his (dishonourable, presumably) superior officer. Since then he's been doing some sort of (honourable, presumably) criminal stuff. An opening crawl explicitly compares him to ronin, which makes sense given his military background, but less sense when you realize the movie is very much going for a Western feel.

 We first meet McReady as he kills a few dozen people in a Mexican building while rescuing a woman (Madison Lawlor). It's an excellent running battle, well-filmed and featuring a fun, if slightly subdued (for Adkins's standards) choreography. 

 We later find out the woman is McReady's niece, who was taken by a cartel because her deadbeat father tried to screw them over in a drug deal. When they're back they, plus her mom (Caitlin Keats) try to run away before the inevitable cartel reprisal, but they're held by a corrupt local sheriff (Nick Chinlund).
 So the cartel boss (Tony Perez) and a dozen or so interchangeable henchmen arrive and lay siege to the house, trying to kill McReady and retrieve one of those convenient USB drives with critical drug business information.
 There are some flourishes, but... that's basically it. Close Range is a very meat-and-potatoes low-budget action movie: uncomplicated, unpretentious, kind of dumb, well-executed. The moment-to-moment action is excellent - gritty but with some acrobatic flourishes, and it's got a few ideas and memorable images, such as pitting Adkins's martial arts against a speeding SUV or a very painful-looking stab to the taint. Lots of people shooting through walls, too, a little-loved action trope I tend to enjoy.
 Speaking of which: The film features some wonderful, wholly practical squib and explosive work to give its frequent shootouts more heft; After what feels like a steady diet of middling CGI substitutions on that department lately, I can't overstate what a pleasure it is to get a full meal like this.

A pantry fight results in a rain of cheerios. As it should.

 As good as the action is, it doesn't flow very well; There's no drama to it, and most of the final third of the movie feels like people shooting the shit out of a house without hitting anyone for ages. It looks great, but the film feels oddly drawn out. That's exacerbated by some pretty egregious filler and some pretty weird choices: There are a few scenes early with the cartel where we get a hilarious amount of reaction shots of various thugs reacting to their boss chewing out and then murdering an employee, for example, and soon afterwards we're introduced to each one of these goons in turn, complete with a freeze frame and a helpful name tag. That'd be cool if they were interesting characters, or if they had even a tiny bit of colour, but that's not the case.
 Out of the great occidental action VOD director triad, Florentine remains a distant third favorite (after John Hyams and Jesse V. Johnson); He's got great technical chops, but I don't think I've found any of his movies convincing in the drama department after Undisputed 2. He needs a Michael Jai White-level presence to offset his corniness.

 The script (by Shane Dax Taylor and Chad Law) doesn't really come up with much to give the film any personality, either, and the dialog is often atrocious. Adkins is fine - this is hardly a challenge for him, as he mostly has to act angry all the time (his American accent sounds convincing to my ears, but we already knew that). The acting quality from everyone else varies a lot, unfortunately, but I guess that's not a huge strike against this sort of thing.

 Solid, in other words. A bit disappointing that it fails to gather any steam, but worth it for the different kinds of kind of low-key mayhem everyone gets up to.