As Ben pointed out to me earlier today the amount of extra time I've been having to spend at work recently has been causing the quality of blog posts to suffer a bit (and let's be honest, they weren't that spectacular to being with).
A while back as I was perusing Netflix I stumbled across The Contract. I forget how I got to it, probably following links of actors. I had never heard of the movie even though it apparently came out in 2006. Since I like both John Cusack and Morgan Freeman I figured what the heck, let's do this. So when the movie showed up and I found out the reason I had never heard of it was because it was a straight to DVD title I got a bit worried. I mean, if you have the star power of John Cusack and Morgan Freeman in a film and you end up going straight to DVD there's got to be something wrong with that picture. The film stretches the believability a bit by having Morgan Freeman playing a hitman named Carden. Carden on his way to a job is in a car accident and gets captured by the police, as he's being transported to a new holding facility the convey carrying him (which for some reason is taking an obscure back road through the woods) gets attacked. It's Carden's former employers as they've decided Carden is a liability. Carden gets away into the woods where he meets up with John Cusack's character Ray who just happens to be on a nature outing with his delinquent teenage son who he's trying to reconnect with. Blah blah blah. Ray decides it's his civic duty to transport Carden to the authorities all the while being chased by other hitmen trying to kill them. The plot isn't anything special. Neither Feeman or Cusack really come across as action stars in my mind, so the movie has a bit of an uphill struggle to overcome from the get go. Add to that a decidedly average plot and the feeling that Cusack and Freeman are phoning in their performances and you have a movie with a lot of star power that feels like a weak to average action film.
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