Director Report Card: Neveldine/Taylor (2022)

7. Panama

Directed by Mark Neveldine

In 2021, Vulture published an article delving into the somewhat sketchy business dealings of producer Randall Emmett. Emmett built a mini-empire of low-budget, direct-to-VOD action movies in which washed-up stars of old get top-billing for appearing in a handful of scenes, while generic theatrics starring much cheaper actors happen around them. The article would provide an extremely useful name for this style of movie, which has somehow proliferated over the last decade: The geezer teaser. You get a geezer, film enough scenes with him to qualify as a “teaser,” stick his name above the title and his face on the DVD box, and fill the rest of the 90 minutes out with whatever. It's a classic exploitation movie model that, despite the death of video stores and Redbox, has proliferated. The incredibly depressing last ten years of Bruce Willis' career was made up almost entirely of these kind of movies, for only the most prominent example. 

Considering his horribly racist antics have slowly made him hard to hire for big budget productions, it's no surprise that Mel Gibson would find steady work in this niche. In 2022, Mel would lent his fading star power to five such films. They have generic names like “Hot Seat,” “Agent Game,” “Bandit,” or “On the Line” and not a single soul alive can recall actually watching any of them. Rarely are the filmmakers behind these strictly mercenary productions any one especially notable. There are exceptions though. Mark Neveldine, half of the ostensibly talented team that brought us the “Crank” movies, would take a paycheck making one of these in 2022. And that is why I'm talking about “Panama,” sure to be among the least notable motion pictures I will ever write about. 

As the title suggests, “Panama” is set in 1989, right before the United States' invasion of the titular country. Retired bad-ass Becker is drinking away his grief over a dead wife. An old co-worker named Stark approaches him with an employment opportunity. Becker is hired by the CIA to go undercover in Central America. He is to infiltrate the local casino and drug trafficking business to help purchase a helicopter for Contra rebels in a scheme designed to assassinate Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Becker soon gets in over his head, making friends and enemies, falling in love with a beautiful woman named Camila, and becoming sympathetic to those fighting against the military regime. 

By some extraordinary circumstances, “Panama” was not produced by Randall Emmett. His movies are usually distributed by Liongates. This one was put out by Saban Films – yes, the “Power Rangers” guys – who have also had a hand in plenty of movies like this. Despite no association with the King of the Geezer Teasers, “Panama” still checks off all the boxes to qualify. Gibson's face takes up the most room on the poster, his name above the title, despite having maybe ten minutes of screen time throughout the film. Mostly in the beginning and end, with a couple of scenes of him talking on the phone peppered throughout. Instead, a lumbering Cole Hauser is the actual star of the movie. There's an abundant amount of female nudity, plenty of sex, lots of guns, and a moderate amount of explosions and shoot-outs. One of the CIA guys we see at the start of the movie turns out to be a bad guy at the end. It's all extremely routine.

One can't help but assume that films of this type are primarily rented, bought, and watched by the most non-discerning of audiences. By which I mean old guys. The geezer teaser is designed to appeal to exactly the kind of facile macho wish fulfilment fantasies of its ideal viewer. “Taken” is the bigger budget predecessor to the entire genre, a movie specifically design to appeal to dads looking to re-establish their masculine powers despite being well into the second half of their lives. Fittingly, the hero of “Panama” is a semi-retired tough guy who is wracked with guilt over the death of a wife, having crawled into a bottle to cope. His adventure here takes him to an exotic land where he gets to show that he's still a bad-ass and hop into bed with another beautiful woman, while still nebulously seeking revenge for the death of his first wife. The very first scene even includes Gibson, in voiceover, describing what a certified action hero this guy is and how kicking ass and taking names for the U.S. of A. is the best feeling in the world. 

In other words, “Panama” is lowest common denominator stuff, designed to thrill and titillate only the most bored of customers. Despite that obvious goal, the film has a surprisingly convoluted plot. One might even call it needlessly convoluted. The story involves our hero making deals, manipulating, back-stabbing, and bossing around a number of shady drug lords, rebel types, and high rollers. I'll admit, I lost track of the story almost immediately. “Panama” works through a plethora of subplots and supporting characters as it winds through its glacially paced 95 minute runtime. Faces come and go, often getting shot, but not a one of them make an impression, much less what purpose they serve in this meandering narrative.

That's the dirty secret of the geezer teaser. Well, the other one, after the obvious fact that the washed-up action icon promised on the Netflix thumbnail won't actually do that much. No, despite ostensibly luring the audience in with action movie cheap thrills, these movies are frequently uneventful. Still, within the realm of this underachieving subgenre, “Panama” is an especially egregious example. An overwhelmingly large percentage of this motion picture is made up of people sitting around in rooms and talking. Becker talks to rebel leaders in underground bunkers. He talks to drug kingpins in their hotel rooms, by the pool, on their balconies. He makes deals at the casino, answer phone calls in bed and on the couch. For a film that promises big action, “Panama” mostly delivers a lot of sitting around and talking it out. 

Why this is the case is not too difficult to discern. Obviously, “Panama” is mostly dudes sitting in rooms because that's a whole lot cheaper to do than actual action scenes. That cheapness radiates off this entire production. There are many signs throughout that very little money was available here. Every time a gun fire, a cheap-looking CGI muzzle flair is utilized. The characters outright reference “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns 'n' Roses before instead playing a generic piece of rock music, cause this movie had nowhere near the funds to licenses a well known song. The most hilariously cheap sequence in the film arrives when Becker is challenged to a dirt bike race by the secondary antagonist. What follows is a messy montage of close-ups of the actual actors on bikes, wearing helmets, and quite clearly barely moving cut together with far-off shots of stuntmen on the same bikes doing all the actual racing. To further sell this half-assed illusion, there are several shots in which the camera was mounted to the side of the bike... Meaning the riders' asses are right in our faces. A bold cinematic choice there, let me tell ya. 

The handful of times “Panama” actually does attempt to function as an action movie are equally underwhelmed. A shoot-out between Contra rebels and government backed enforcers is haphazardly edited, to the point of near incoherence. Mel Gibson does actually appear to kick a dude in one scene. At 66 years old, Mel was still a more convincing action figure than Cole Hauser. Burly, somewhat doughy Hauser shuffles like an arthritic sasquatch through a handful of fight scenes. The most embarrassing of which is a very slow foot chase down a flight of stairs, the filmmakers desperately attempting to make this mundane scene look exciting through a rapid fire succession of edits. When that doesn't work – which it never does – the film leans on some shaky, handheld camera instead. 

While it's hard to read that last factoid as a positive measure, it is one of the few signs that half of the team who made “Crank” was responsible for this movie. Mark Neveldine's visual style has always featured gritty, frantic camera work. Aside from that, the Neveldine/Taylor style can be spotted briefly a few other times. Military insurgents playing their machine guns as if they are guitars, while epic riffs play on the radio and shooting at bad guys, is the kind of over-the-top, self-consciously ridiculous macho thing you'd expect from these guys. The irreverent and edgy dialogue is also apparent in Gibson's voiceover narration, which often feels like tossed-off one-liners Mel recorded during a lunch break. Also, a minor character has the middle name of “Fagoth,” the sort of willfully offensive comedy that crops up in the more Tromatastic moments of the directors' work.

Other than that, it feels like any old hack could've directed “Panama.” The film also includes plenty of the leering sexism that cropped up in the “Crank” flicks and “Gamer.” Not that this is unique to Mark Neveldine. However, even by the standards of low budget action movies, “Panama” shows a startling disregard for women. The sex and nudity is excessive, with Hauser's primary love interest existing mostly to writhe around naked atop him while he awkwardly lays there. The drug kingpin character is always surrounded by half-naked or fully naked concubines. At one point, he presents a woman's crotch to our hero and says it is the source of all power. If that wasn't glaringly sexist enough, every female character in the movie exists to either die and provide a tragic motivation for the hero, be sexualized, captured, nag at him, or all of the above. If the film didn't suck so bad, casual misogyny of this level would almost be kind of impressive. 

Somehow, reducing every woman in this story to bitches, whores, or corpses is not the most offensive thing about “Panama.” The movie invoking the U.S. imperialism in Central America of the late eighties almost could get a pass, as some sort of ironic statement about Uncle Sam's action during this time. Instead, the script seems quite sincere in treating the interloping CIA agents as the good guys. Far worse is how the film invokes the abuse and war crimes that occurred during Noriega's reign. Hauser wanders through a refugee camp filled with dismembered and crippled men, women, and children. At one point, hideous sexual violence committed by the soldiers is referenced. Why put these scenes in your disposable action movie? Was this an attempt to add some gravitas to the material? Or another one of the Neveldine/Taylor provocations? Either way, it surely sticks out, moving the film from merely tacky to utterly tasteless. 

More honestly, these gross elements feel like the result more of a clueless lack-of-effort than a genuine attempt to offend. When not being funny in its cheapness or questionable in its politics, “Panama” is mostly extremely boring. The film easily feels twice as long as its modest hour-and-a-half runtime, going on past several logical end points. It is very sad that a filmmaker who once could be counted on for hyperactive, outrageous subversions of standard action tropes would end up doing a movie so totally lacking in drive, originality, or a sense of purpose as this. “Panama” might not be the worst movie I've reviewed. It might be among the laziest though, an aggressively tedious and pointless experience whose appeals to puerile interest can't awaken the viewer from the stupor it puts them in. [Grade: F]