Movie Review: 'Pursuit' John Cusack Taking Cues from Bruce Willis in No Effort Action Flick

While Bruce Willis gets most of the attention for his late career paycheck cheapies, John Cusack has been toiling away on the same easy paycheck circuit. Cusack’s recent resume may not be as stunningly inept and lazy as Willis’s output, but it is nearly as disreputable. As evidence I present to you the scuzzy new action thriller, Pursuit. The film stars the ever less reputable Emile Hirsch and someone named Jake Manley with Cusack seemingly allowing a film crew to capture scenes of him puttering around his house to include in the movie.

Pursuit stars Emile Hirsch as gangster-hacker Rick Calloway. Rick’s wife has gone missing and using the dark web, Rick is unraveling the criminal enterprise that is hiding and torturing her for the sadistic purpose of antagonizing Rick. In his pursuit of the truth, Rick tracks down a drug dealer who happens to be the subject of a sting by undercover NYPD Detectives. Unknowingly interrupting the bust, Rick kills several people and injures a pair of cops including Detective Mike Breslin played by Jake Manley.

Breslin has a tragic backstory that loosely mirrors Rick’s own tragic story. Breslin’s wife was attacked in the apartment they shared in New York City and died when her attackers threw her off of the balcony several floors to her death. She was also pregnant at the time, compounding the tragedy that seems to have affected the detective about as much as a minor fender bender. He appears to have suffered very little and gone about his work as a detective unfussed by the murder of his wife and unborn daughter.

That is either a function of actor Jake Manley’s remarkably inert performance or a function of a style of filmmaking that renders Breslin’s background as something that was added in post without the actor being made aware of it. Truly, Manley seems as surprised about his backstory as we are. When Hirsch’s bad boy Rick tells the detective that he can help him capture the men who killed his wife Manley’s reaction appears to be more confusion than intrigue or shock.

Regardless, this backstory is only moderately important to the utter chaos of Pursuit, a movie that haphazardly introduces characters with their own bizarre backstories and nonsensical motivations. Actor Andrew Stevens, also a producer of the film, is introduced halfway through the movie as one of the main antagonists. He’s apparently a rival criminal or ally of Cusack who plays Rick’s dad, John, also apparently a criminal kingpin. Stevens' criminal mastermind intends on punishing Rick for some unseen, off-screen offense while John asks him not to harm Rick with all of the convincing energy of a guy mildly inconvenienced by something.

Yes, John Cusack’s character’s name is John. So uninterested in this movie is John Cusack that even giving his character a name other than his own, was too much to ask. Honestly, if I really wanted to drill down on this movie, I might be able to make a case that Cusack isn’t actually in this movie and was, in fact, filmed surreptitiously in his home while he puttered about. Cusack has one rather confusing and brief encounter with Emile Hirsch before driving off in what could possibly be his own car. Beyond that, it’s hard to prove Cusack was actually intentionally involved in the making of Pursuit.

The movie begins in New York City but somehow winds up transferred to a suburb in Arkansas and one could very easily imagine that this change was made just to accommodate the fact that Cusack didn’t want to leave a Midwestern hideaway he owns, so the filmmakers were forced to change locations in order to make up for Cusack’s rural home in the midst of a New York City based crime story.

Continuing with the lazy, half-assed, borderline incoherent story choices, actor William Katt receives an introduction to Pursuit more than halfway through the movie. He plays an Arkansas County Sheriff who may or may not be corrupt. The character’s motivation appears to change from one brief scene to the next. One scene he’s menacing and unhelpful, the next he’s on board for catching the baddies, then he’s shooting a guy in the back who may or may not have been on his side, depending on which side Katt’s character is actually on.

Most of the action of Pursuit is handled by characters not played by the well known members of the cast. Cusack, of course, never leaves his house, aside from driving his expensive car to perhaps run to the store while the film’s final moments play out. Stevens does leave his house but does little other than getting blown up by a terrible bit of CGI. Katt does shoot someone but he’s mostly offscreen and Hirsch seems to enjoy firing an automatic weapon but appears incoherent for most of the movie.

Hirsch mumbles through his lines, appears disinterested in almost everything to do with the movie, and seems to have decided on character bits as improv that the filmmakers had to add to the movie to make his performance make sense. I can’t prove that is what happened but it is either that or filmmaker Brian Skiba is a really terrible director who made his actors look lazy, unprepared, and unprofessional through his incompetence.

Pursuit is quite a remarkable disaster. Would I call it ‘so bad it’s good?’ No, not really. Pursuit isn’t bad in a fun way, it’s just mostly bad. Pursuit is a perhaps a curiosity but it is mostly a lazy, disinterested, and scuzzy movie. The acting is embarrassing, especially that of Jake Manley who has to carry the movie despite the well known supporting players around him. That said, it may not be his fault. Many of Manley's scenes play like reshoots that were done with the intention of papering over plot holes created by Hirsch's chaotic performance and Cusack's complete disinterest in the plot.

Pursuit is being released straight to streaming rental services on February 18th, 2022.