Home on leave, marine Jake Carter (Mike ‘the Miz’ Mizanin) is looking forward to catching up with his sisters (Ashley Bell and Camille Sullivan). Put off by his take-charge attitude, he finds himself at odds with both of them.
But since this is an action movie, his emotionally stunted personality becomes an asset when one of his sisters is kidnapped and he has to get her back.
Standing in his way is Pope (Neal McDonough), a terrorist who has bigger plans than kidnapping random women in the forest…
The third Marine movie is the franchise finding its footing and its star.
I cannot say I will ever watch it again, but it is a massive improvement over The Marine 2.
The Miz is often criticized for being an actor rather than a professional wrestler, but that is exactly what you need here. He might not be a secret Brando but he is at home with this kind of potboiler. Jake Carter is a straight shooter who is obsessed with discipline and achieving goals. There is something a bit starch about him, but the film is aware of that, and the Miz has no problem portraying that.
As far as the rest of the movie goes, it is solid. The cast are fine, the script gives Carter a little bit of meat in the first act, and makes sure that that context remains consistent throughout. He has strong but strained relationships with his sisters - and when someone kidnaps one of them, he uses his skills to get her back.
There is a pleasing simplicity to the movie from a narrative point of view. I cannot say I enjoyed it, but compared with its predecessor, it was nice to just be in a generic programmer.
What I found interesting was that while the film opens with a promotional piece for the Marines, the script does not hold Jake up as a paragon of virtue.
As soon as he is home, he is ordering his sisters around and keen to fix whatever he thinks is broken about their lives. Part of it is familial concern, but the film make sit clear that Carter is obsessed with achieving goals and imposing his own high standards on his family. When the action kicks in, Carter is on the outs with his family.
If you have seen Die Hard, this is familiar character set up - by the end of the movie, Carter will learn to accept his sisters' personal autonomy, and they will realise his anti-social tendencies and killing skills have their place.
One thing I did notice was a little ambiguity to the ending. Carter watches his sisters hugging their respective partners. But in the final shot, Carter is alone smiling ruefully to himself. Is this a flicker of self-awareness? Does he realise he is incapable of forming relationships for himself? It is a small moment, but it is a sliver of character shading that won me over as the movie closed.
The acting across the board are solid. And the filmmakers continue to have great taste with their villain casting.
Neal McDonough is a great actor. His piercing blue eyes and preening delivery, he always seems to be at home as a high status villain. I do not think he is given a lot to do, but his presence does give this movie some heft. I am not sure he is as invested as Morrison was in Marine 2, but he is not checked out. As with the rest of this movie, he’s fine. We are at net 0 after the deficit of the last movie.
If I have quibble with his character, it is that his final showdown with Carter is incredibly perfunctory. Whatever my complaints with Marine 2, it at least gave Temuera Morrison a final brawl and a fiery demise worthy of a big bad. Here, Pope's death feels like the filmmakers ran out of time or money.
There is a bizarre continuity with the villains of the previous movie. Pope is a philosophy major whose family were destroyed by a combination of the 2008 stock market crash and the US healthcare system. He has banded together with a small militia group to enact an explosion in Seattle.
That alliance confuses his ideology a bit - he seems to be obsessed with the upper classes, while the militia seem to be more libertarian. There is not a lot of meat to this disparity - I am basing this on contextual clues - but it seems to be an alliance based on a thirst for violence and profit, rather than anything else.
While Marine 2 strained to be bigger in scope, Marine 3 feels designed for watching at home.
The film avoids major action setpieces until the end, and the kidnapping is presented in a siege format, with Pope’s gang hiding out on a disused ferry. It is a fantastic piece of set dressing, and gives the movie a stronger sense of location and geography.
While the movie ticks off most of the boxes for being a passable timewaster, the one frustrating aspect of the film is the action.
It is not as confusing as 2, but the editing is still haphazard. Clearly they did not have as much time to film the action scenes but it often felt like actors had filmed on different days. The editing could smooth this out, but it often feels like characters were not even occupying the same space.
There are a couple of interesting visual touches. I liked the point-of-view shots during the SWAT ambush. These shots did feel arbitrary - they are spliced in at different moments but never feel that functional within the sequence. It might have been a visual idea that did not come off, and they tried to salvage it.
Marine 3: Homefront is a major improvement over the previous entry. It is no masterpiece, but it sets out its humble goals, and it hits most of them. The action is a little lackluster, but a strong lead performance, otherwise decent production values and a solid enough story carry it over the finish line.
CURRENT RANKING
1. The Marine 5: Battleground (old review)
2. The Marine 6: No Quarter (old review)
3. The Marine
4. The Marine 3: Homefront
5. The Marine 2
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