THE BRICKLAYER -- Average Actioner Elevated by Steadfast Journeyman Direction

Review by Daniel Lima

Watching Aaron Eckhart languish in the bowels of direct-to-video hell, turning in solid lead performances in dreck destined to be ignored and forgotten, is enough to make any fan of cinema pray for his respite, appealing to some higher power for a real director — an auteur with the stature and command of film craft — to lift him from those depths and elevate him to his rightful place as an A-list star, heralded for his committed performances. Instead, he got Renny Harlin, helming the cinematic airport novel The Bricklayer. It falls well short of being a vehicle to relaunch a career, but as passable entertainment for a couple of hours, there are worse options.

Eckhart plays the titular day laborer, a former CIA operative who turned his back on the agency long ago. When an old, presumed-dead colleague reemerges in Greece and threatens to reveal compromising state secrets that could threaten America's standing among the nations of the world, it's up to the weary vet and his green, professional young supervisor to tie up loose ends.​

Renny Harlin has been making movies for the past forty years, ranging from big American studio projects to Chinese blockbusters to Reunion 3: Singles Cruise. He is the textbook definition of a journeyman director, but in the DTV space today, a film like this does stand out. It's shot on location in the streets of Greece and uses practical effects, including rain, squibs, and blanks, letting shots linger and leaving scenes room to breathe. There is a tactile, tempered feeling to The Bricklayer that eludes the slapdash offerings that make up the built of titles destined to go digital, particularly in the muscular action set pieces. As polished as it is, you might mistake it for a mid-budget studio project from two decades ago.

This isn't to oversell what's on offer; this is still disposable fare. The film is nearly two hours long, and much of it is characters either speaking exposition at each other or tortured bargain bin thriller cliches. Eckhart gives a far less compelling performance here than in other projects in the past year and has zero on-screen chemistry with likable co-lead Nina Dobrev. The exotic locales the film takes place in are captured with the same care and attention as the glass and steel offices of the CIA, and the budget can only go so far before a rich gangster's den of hedonism looks like a pool party at a suburban home. As solid as the film's craft is, it lacks the dynamism and idiosyncrasy of a truly memorable work.

One curious aspect of this film is its politics. The narrative is about a former government asset killing off journalists and framing the CIA while threatening to release information about agency assassinations around the world. Our nominal heroes are working with the CIA to stop this information from leaking out, thus preserving America's hegemonic power. Characters voice respect for others' sense of duty to their country, and the film even features at least one shot of an American flag blowing handsomely in the wind. Yet Eckhart's character has some semblance of cynicism concerning his black ops work, and more emphasis is placed on the chaos-release thing information would unleash than on full-throated jingoism. What is the position of the filmmakers? Is the American empire too big to fail? Are the unseemly things the country does in the interest of national security a bridge too far? Of course, this is a movie where the star of Thank You for Smoking kills men with a bricklayer's trowel, so these questions are a bit beyond its scope. One can't help but wonder what heights could have been achieved with a bit more ambition.

Ultimately, how much one enjoys The Bricklayer is directly proportional to how excited one gets when they hear, "Renny Harlin is directing Aaron Eckhart in an action movie called The Bricklayer." So long as you know the keywords, that sentence tells you everything you need to know: this is a no-frills, by-the-numbers, take-it-or-leave-it action vehicle that gets by with a steady hand at the wheel and a sense of craftsmanship earned by toiling for decades in an inhospitable industry. For some, that means very little. For me, as middling as this is, I know I'll be there for The Bricklayer 2.

The Bricklayer is now in theaters and on VOD.
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​Rating: 3/5