Sacrifice

Sacrifice casts Cuba Gooding Jr as John Hebron, a grizzled cop who’s been drinking heavily and contemplating suicide ever since his wife and daughter were murdered by a vicious mobster. John receives a shot at redemption after he reluctantly agrees to take care of a little girl, with the film subsequently following John’s ongoing efforts at protecting the kid and, eventually, bringing her criminal father (Kim Coates’ Arment) to justice. It’s clear immediately that Sacrifice isn’t going to change Gooding Jr’s luck within the pervasively underwhelming straight-to-video arena, as the movie’s almost astonishing lack of positive attributes ensures that the viewer is simply unable to work up any enthusiasm or interest in the central character’s plight – with this feeling compounded by the laughably hackneyed brush with which the protagonist has been painted (eg John practically comes off as a parody of this type of figure). Director Damian Lee, who also wrote the movie, has infused the proceedings with a disastrously sluggish pace that serves only to highlight its various problems, while Gooding Jr and his various costars are simply unable to breathe any life into their uniformly one-dimensional characters. (Christian Slater, cast as a sympathetic priest, stands as the one bright spot within the film, as the actor delivers a surprisingly compelling performance that’s far too limited in screentime to make any real difference.) And although Lee offers up a climactic shootout within a church that’s relatively well done, Sacrifice has long-since established itself as just another bottom-of-the-barrel DTV effort that brings Gooding Jr one step closer to total irrelevance.

1/2* out of ****