Death Warrant

Directed by Deran Sarafian, Death Warrant follows Canadian police officer Louis Burke (Jean-Claude Van Damme) as he goes undercover within a notoriously violent prison to look into a series of unsolved murders. Filmmaker Sarafian, working from David S. Goyer’s script, delivers a mostly ineffective actioner that grows less and less interesting (and more and more interminable) as time progresses, with the movie’s heavy emphasis on Burke’s investigation into the aforementioned murders paving the way for a seriously meandering and underwhelming midsection (ie it’s just not compelling in the slightest). The paucity of fight sequences within Death Warrant‘s first half only exacerbates the frustratingly uninvolving atmosphere, and it doesn’t help, either, that the picture has been littered with an assortment of pointless, time-wasting subplots – including the requisite (yet completely shoehorned-in) romance for Van Damme’s character and a silly digression involving a teen hacker (Joshua Miller’s Douglas). The admittedly decent brawl that closes the proceedings is unable to compensate for the bottom-of-the-barrel bent of everything preceding it, ultimately, which cements Death Warrant‘s place as a palpable low point within Van Damme’s spotty body of work.

* out of ****