Repeater is currently available in select theaters and on demand and digital from Saban Films.
Spoiler Alert: I don’t get to see all movies. I know, I know, the shock is real… When I do, of course, I don’t always talk about it, and the same can be said with director R. Ellis Frazier’s resumè as I’ve only seen his 2014 Gary Daniels actioner, Misfire up to this point. He’s done two more with the British kicker since then, now with Daniels in the role of antagonist opposite actor Paul Sidhu who plays John, a globetrotting gun for hire quietly pining for a way out of the redundant, cyclic life of violence in the Saban Films release, Repeater.
Fast forward from an awry mission in Bolivia to our protagonist’s reassignment in Tijuana with the help of his elusive handler, Edgar (Corbin Bernsen). The mission: to track and eliminate Jean (Nick Moran), a French national whose encrypted possession of sensitive information about the head of an American conglomerate, Silver (James Faulkner), has since made him a target. The mission gets botched in John’s attempt to get surveillance and it’s only a matter of time before John nabs Jean, and is confronted with a choice that could soon have him facing death at the hands of former “colleagues”, all of whom are elite experts at killing, including Jean’s bodyguard, Nadya (Kristanna Loken), and Silver’s right hand, Heinrich (Daniels).
Just shy of charismatic, Sidhu bodes well as the lead from a script written by Frazier and co-writer Benjamin Budd. He’s no John Wick and even a little bit of the writing leaves him worse for wear at times; in a scene at a store, he makes a crack with the beautiful store clerk about the many ways to kill people with an apple, and it doesn’t land in the way it needs to, even as the script makes it so the clerk to laugh it off as a point of charm, even if we’re not.
His remaining screentime is largely phoned-in, contributing to an otherwise middling potboiler action flick that tends to pace itself with inessential plodding in its progression at times, carried only by the performances of some of its noteworthy co-stars including Moran and Loken, and topped off with a forced on-screen romance with a prostitute named Esperanza (Marilyn Uribe). The action scenes are about as average as you can expect from a film not particularly fight scene-focused in terms of technical aspects, but there are a few notable sequences to take from the film, including two fight scenes in different bars separately featuring Sidhu and Daniels, and the final fight between both actors which does guarantee some excitement.
Tread carefully though if you’re a fan of Daniels, as this is precisely the kind of film that’s been plaguing the actor for a while now. Repeater sadly relives a lot of what compels you to tune out at times, but for an independent action thriller with a few well-knowns to add some more pep in its step, it’s not a total loss.