After watching Proud Mary, I was bemused and unsatisfied. While I still love and admire Taraji P. Henson for being a great actress and inspiring woman, she is unable to fully flex her acting muscles with the film’s mediocre material. Furthermore, the production does not seem to know which theme it wants to focus upon: surrogacy drama, gangster warfare flick, or modern-day Coffy? As a result, despite the final act’s fun, gun-toting, Tina Turner-scored sequence, the film ultimately sinks under the weight of its thematic confusion and under-developed characters.
The film begins with colourful opening credits that show Mary getting dressed up for her next contract. I did enjoy this sequence’s nod to retro 1970’s Blaxploitation films, and it made me excited to see what action the film had in store. It also showcased the beauty and self-assuredness of Henson’s character, with the latter characteristic immediately chrystallised by her point-blank shooting of a man.
However, I feel the handling of this assassination’s immediate aftermath is the film’s first, and perhaps greatest, mistake. After dispatching the target, Mary happens upon the victim’s son Danny – played by acting newcomer Jahi Di’Allo Winston – in the next room, who is blissfully unaware of the incident. While she quickly flees the scene, the audience only briefly gets to see the guilt and emotional burden Mary feels before the screen cuts to a “One Year Later” intertitle, performing a time jump and omitting how this significant event affected the characters’ development. Consequently, Danny is now living on Boston’s streets as a courier between small-time drug dealers. But without any allusion to what happened since the shooting or the emotions both Danny and Mary have had to deal with, I couldn’t help but feel the film was just treading through the usual genre tropes with the characters embodying stereotypes. Danny is being abused by a mean, stock character drug lord, and the emotional damage he’s suffered is barely explored, save for a cursory conversation between Mary and Danny later in the film. Unfortunately, the film merely accepts Mary taking out the gangster in an early scene as a resolution to Danny’s history of emotional abuse.
Yet it would be unfair to not give credit where credit is due. Henson does a wonderful job showcasing Mary’s latent mothering nature, with her efforts to feed, clothe and house Danny providing some of the film’s more intimate character moments, which while sparse are superb. The likely reason Henson excels here is that she can draw upon her own experience as a mother to portray the same emotions one would feel in such a situation, and inform the extreme lengths one would go to in order to protect their children.
Nicely complementing her is the relatively new actor Winston as Danny, who does a respectable job of depicting the anger and pain a teenager would feel after losing their parents. The verbal sparring between Danny and Mary is where the film’s script shines by creating a believable, warm relationship between both – surrogate – mother and son.
However, even this relationship suffers missteps. After Danny learns that Mary murdered his father there is a breakdown in the relationship between them. Danny projects his rightful hatred and anger at Mary for having effectively sentenced him to the dreadful life he’s endured over the previous year. Yet within five minutes, Danny forgets this and runs into Mary’s arms; all is forgiven and pushed aside. I could not help but feel incredulous because of this glaring gaffe in the building of the relationship between these characters.
Moving away from these main characters, we find an array of largely forgettable performances. Danny Glover gloats reliably as the mob boss Benny whom refuses to let Mary leave their family and life of crime unless it is in a body bag. While Glover does a perfectly fine job of being simultaneously warm and intimidating, he is not given much screen time to leave a lasting impression. We also have Billy Brown as the rather dull Tom, Mary’s former lover who still pines after her and does all he can to seduce her back into his arms. While there were a handful of intimate moments between the two characters that, once again largely thanks to Henson, did turn up the heat from cold turkey to lukewarm chicken casserole, I just couldn’t buy into their long and torrid love history as there was no backstory or even prerequisite flashbacks to showcase the passionate love they once – supposedly – shared. Furthermore, Tom feels such an underdeveloped and one-dimensional character (always scowling or seemingly bored) that I didn’t feel any great sympathy for him or a desire for Mary to fall back into his arms.
On the other hand, while I bemoan Proud Mary’s characters, some of which are more fully realised than others, I feel the film’s mishandling of its themes are its biggest letdown. When I watched the movie’s trailer I saw the production as an ode to camp, ass-kicking, independent women films such as Foxy Brown, Coffy (Henson being a modern-day Pam Grier), or even the more recent Kill Bill and Atomic Blonde. And the film does – partially – deliver upon these titillating promises, with Henson storming about in a fabulous leather get-up and wig dispatching incompetent men left, right and centre. However, such thrilling scenes are few and far between. Instead, large segments of the film are given to melodrama, a paint-by-numbers mob family story that leaves the viewer largely uninterested (The Godfather this ain’t), and an uninspired tale of unrequited love between two characters of whom we have little backstory. As a result I felt the film suffered from split personality disorder for most of its duration, lurching awkwardly between the above topics.
Yet when all seemed lost, the film’s final act kicked things into overdrive. Mary makes short work of the army of henchmen standing between her and Danny. To top it off this blockbuster sequence is choreographed superbly to the film’s musical namesake, which made me root for Mary as a woman who is fighting the mob’s suffocating patriarchy in a desperate attempt to save both her new son and herself from a life of crime. This segment is the entire reason I wanted to see Proud Mary, and it did deliver upon its colourful, action-packed promises.
As I’ve elaborated, Proud Mary has a couple of great action sequences and displays some solid character work in the development of the relationship between Mary and Danny over the course of the film. However, despite Henson and Winston’s best efforts, a conspicuous misstep in the handling of their relationship, a lack of memorable supporting characters, and the film’s general thematic confusion are difficult to look past. And while the final act is action-packed fun due to the rousing score, it feels such a chore to get to this point that it is too little, too late.
If you ask me, this proud Mary needs to eat some humble pie.
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