You know what you're getting about five minutes into The Reunion: the kind of movie that trades brains in for guns, muscles, and breasts (sometimes on the same character), featuring action set pieces in unforgiving terrain (this time it's Mexico), with various sleazy bad guys of foreign origin (this time it's Mexicans). It's the kind of movie that has a plot but not really a script, actors but not really characters,and it's the kind of movie where, in a moment of suspense, a Mexican screams "Ai!!!" while being shoved away in slow-mo from a speeding fireball by a white hero with a gun.
And sure, you can nitpick about how all of this makes for a pretty crappy flick. Far be it from me to argue any of those points. But, accept all these shortcomings at the outset, and you'll find that The Reunion isn't entirely terrible. Granted, it's not good by a long shot, or even appreciably bad, for that matter. The movie is too rough around the edges and lacking in genuine suspense for it to rise to the high-quality crappiness that makes, say, a Chuck Norris or Van Damme flick enjoyable in that trashy, B-movie way. But there is something here.
For one, the setup is actually fairly intriguing: an old man dies, and his four children -- a policeman (WWE's John Cena), a bail bondsman (Ethan Embry), a jailbird (Boyd Holbrook) and, erm, Amy Smart -- are set to inherit his fortune, provided they can open, start, and operate a family business for two years; somehow in all of this a skeezy Wall Street type is kidnapped, and the brothers decide to become a team of two-bit bounty hunters, or something along those lines.
