BLU-RAY/DVD REVIEWS

A betrayed diamond thief (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) teams up with a mob boss (Bruce Willis) to get revenge on his former partner.

The only thing that this film seemed to be sure of was the fact that it was going to be about a heist. The rest of the film was revolving around trying not to make the film cliché, and by doing so, helped contribute to the movie not making any freaking sense whatsoever. I went into the movie with an open mind and was pretty stoked for Bruce Willis’ role in the movie. Unfortunately, even Willis couldn’t save this mess of a movie from the awfulness that SETUP suffers from.

The main thing that stuck out to me right off the bat was the dialogue. It has the feel of being written by someone who has never interacted with a normal human being in his or her entire life. Every other word being used is “man” to the action flick equivalent of the word “like” in a film about high school girls. Randy Couture’s character has one priceless line when he’s talking to 50 Cent’s character where he says this gem in regards to a couple of Russians they’re about to rob, “…Then you’re going to run back here like a crack nigger at a police funeral. You down with that, homie?” Whaaaat?

Aside from the lack of actual good dialogue, a lot of it just doesn’t make any sense. 50 Cent’s character is talking to a waitress and asks her if it’s a slow night at the diner. Instead of answering yes or no, the girl instead answers him by saying working as a waitress pays the bills and how she’s actually an aspiring singer, yadda yadda.

The film has plot holes all over the place and during the course of the film I found myself saying, “Wait… What?” probably at least once every five minutes. By the end of the movie I was just as unsure about what the hell had just happened as when I was only a couple minutes in. Sometimes with a bad action flick, I can still enjoy it for the cool car chases, action sequences, awesome kills etc. Even that wasn’t possible with SETUP. None of the action makes any sense (if you watch the movie, refer to the heist scene where they all open fire on cars around them for no apparent reason) and for a film that’s helmed by a former stunt man and stunt coordinator, that’s really disappointing.

The Making of Set Up: Apparently over the weekend that 50 Cent decided to work on SETUP, he read around 8 scripts. Of those 8 scripts, SETUP included, he felt that this film was the strongest and decided to sign on. This special feature pretty well sums up my thoughts on the film being made by people not knowing what they were talking about. The sound is absolutely terrible on this feature as well, especially during the cast and crew interviews.

Weapons on the set of Set Up: This feature is pretty pointless, unless you’re a gun fanatic. It just goes through the weapons that were used during the movie and talks about where they came from and why those chose that specific weapon to be in the film.

Interviews with cast and crew: This is another feature that was pretty well pointless. It might’ve been an ok feature to put in if I hadn’t already seen all of the interviews from this in the Making Of special feature. It’s pretty well just recycled footage that’s already been used for this set of features.

Audio commentary with co-writer/director Mike Gunther

Parts of this movie seem really appealing and while it might give off the vibe that this movie is worth watching, try to resist the urge because it’s all a lie. If you think that Bruce Willis is worth seeing it for, he’s really not in it enough to justify a watch just for him. I really thought that the fact that a former stunt man directed the film would mean that the action would be that much cooler. If you really enjoy hokey action B-movies, then by all means check it out, but otherwise, I would try to avoid SETUP.