Movie Review: 'The Bricklayer' is Terrible Action Movie All at Once

The Bricklayer (2024)

Directed by Renny Harlin

Written by Hanna Weg, Matt Johnson

Starring Aaron Eckhardt, Nina Dobrev, Tim Blake Nelson, Clifton Collins Jr.

Release Date January 5th, 2023

Published January 3rd, 2023

The Bricklayer is a remarkably banal and completely terrible movie. The film stars Aaron Eckhardt as the titular bricklayer. Naturally, he's not bricklayer. Oh, he does lay bricks and even builds a small wall early in the movie, but his tragic backstory is soon revealed. The Bricklayer, aka Vail, lost his family when they were slaughtered by his former friend Victor, played by Clifton Collins Jr. This caused Vail to abandon the life of a CIA spy in favor of bricks. Vail suipposedly killed Victor before giving up the CIA to lay bricks for a living, but he was wrong, Victor is alive.

Victor is back to his evil, evil ways, and he is now murdering international journalists and framing the CIA for the kills. The CIA needs Vail to come out of retirement and finish the job of killing Victor. Naturally, the only person the CIA could possibly team Vail with is an inexperienced tech wiz who can find information that the rest of the CIA can't because their lazy and jaded and she's young and beautiful. Nina Dobrev is the whippersnapper CIA agent whose very obvious journey is going from inexperienced and incompetent to a mirror image of Vail's jaded tough guy poseur.

The clichés of The Bricklayer move fast and furious. Literally, some of the clichés in The Br were made cliché by the Fast and Furious movies. In a great example of the lazy action movie tropes on display, The Bricklayer features a scene in which nameless thugs find Vail at his brick laying gig and begin shooting a comical number of bullets at him. One of these bullets does manage to strike our hero in the lower abdomen. Unfortunately for the baddies, Vail is the hero of an action movie so all he has to do is wrap his gaping wound with duct tape before he engages in the kind of hand to hand combat more at at home in an MMA fight than in real life. And all of this fighting is done with a gunshot wound wrapped in duct tape.

In classic movie tough guy fashion, we will never see Vail seek treatment for his gunshot wound to the lower abdomen. You could indeed, infer that he's just wearing duct tape for the rest of the movie and that duct tape has magical healing powers. This scene is followed by another desperately lazy scene in which Vail ignores his new female partner and her mission protocol and her bizarre determination to form a plan before they simply start shooting and fighting their way across Greece. But of course, shooting and fighting his way across a foreign locale is exactly the plan of insert movie tough guy, Vail.

Like all movie tough guys, Vail has old buddies all across the world, including those conveniently placed in Greece to provide him with the intel and guns he will need for his mission. Our insert movie tough guy, Vail, also carries an encyclopedic knowledge of all bad guys everywhere he is so that he can confront and punch and shoot information out of them. Poor Nina Dobrev actually has to drive Vail away from a fight with one of these nameless baddies and say the line "Who was that back there(?)" as if no one has ever said this line before in a thousand insert movie tough guy here movies. If you have Vail started the fight so that he could plant an electronic tracker on one of the baddies, cross that off of your bad action movie bingo card.

Keep those cards hand because the following sequence, If you can believe it, is a scene wherein the good guys have earpieces and talk to each other while scoping a perimeter. BINGO! Surprise of surprises, the bad guy predicts that they will be scoping out the place and calls our hero on a phone that no one has the number too because movie bad guys in bad action movies are magic. Also, cross that off your Bingo card. The baddie, Victor then calls Vail and they tough guy banter at each other while clumsily recreating the cop following the bad guy scene from every movie after The French Connection. Cross that off your card, you almost have a Bingo!

I will not spoil the ending of The Bricklayer, not completely anyway. Can this movie be spoiled? If you don't know how this movie turns out just based on the rote, by the numbers scenes that I have already mentioned, you're not really trying. That said, I do have to shout out the final frame of The Bricklayer. Our hero is laying bricks and listening to Jazz, because liking Jazz fills in for having a personality. And when he finishes his bricklaying job he stands up and then poses in front of a conveniently placed American flag. I burst out laughing when I saw this. A big, loud, guffaw. This is truly the cherry on top of this rancid sundae.

The Bricklayer would be art on the level of Andy Kaufman if I thought for a moment that Renny Harlin wasn't taking all of this nonsense dreadfully, poignantly, seriously. It's just all so shockingly lazy. It's every action movie of the last 40 years sloppily scraped into a blender and frapped into a movie that looks like every other action movie ever made. The dedication to crossing off every clichéd scene from every action movie ever almost feels as if it were intentional but I assure you, it's not. There is never any sense of fun, no winking at the audience. It's merely the rote presentation of the most base, hackneyed action movie scenes in history. It's wildly insulting to the audience and unintentionally hilarious.

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