The Doorman (USA, 2020)

Uh, déjà vu? Here at a wasted life, we hypothesize that whoever is truly responsible for the story behind this movie — the credits claim two names for the story and three for the script — was the roommate of Cory Miller, the credited scriptwriter of Force of Nature, a "less-than-involving, disjointed, by-the-numbers, occasionally laughable and definitely pointless, bullet-heavy action thriller" that was released about three months earlier than The Doorman. So many aspects of the two films are exactly the same but tweaked that one could easily imagine that someone was reading someone else's screenplay while writing their own — then again, it could simply be that, when it came to the two screenplays, no one was interested in creativity or being different and, instead, used the same bullet list of banalities and clichés. 

 

Bullet list:

• A slumming names star to play an "important" character — we say "important" with quotation marks because Jean Reno's Victor Dubois in The Doorman is truly a present character, whereas Mel "You can call me Ambassador" Gibson's character Ray in Force of Nature is not even really needed for the story and exits fairly quickly. 
• The background stories of the protagonists of both movies: tragic, with a death that the hero(es) cannot come to terms with. (In all truth, however, the guy in Force of Nature has it worse than Ruby Rose's character Alexandra "Ali" Gorski: she couldn't stop the death, but he actually [if accidentally] caused it.)
• A virtually empty apartment building with a few remaining inhabitants.
• Hidden artwork worth millions — in Force of Nature, purloined by Nazis during WWII; in The Doorman, purloined by dealers of illegal art (including one German) when the Iron Curtain fell.
• Bad men with big guns that takeover the building to get the hidden art, killing the inhabitants as they see fit.
• Bang! Pow! Someone fights back until the bad guys lose — in Force of Nature, it was definitely a team effort; in The Doorman, it's the highly decorated U.S. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Alexandra "Ali" Gorski that decimates those that should be decimated.
• Vibes of attraction between the two lead adult good people that indicate that heterosexual snogging might be a future option.

Give us a few minutes and we surely could find more points in common, but we would guess that the fact that The Doorman is a pretty generic slab of celluloid is already apparent. That said, as unoriginal and ludicrous as The Doorman is, it remains far more interesting than Force of Nature, if only because it comes across as a bit meaner and has a bit more blood; indeed, when one nice guy gets a hammer to the head, blood actually splatters. And not much later, there is a small, winch-inducing torture scene (regrettably quickly undone by a subsequent humorous scene involving the music of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries).

Trailer to

The Doorman:

A further plus is that The Doorman has Ruby Rose as the lead ass-kicker, and not only does she look good (if possibly a bit on the anorexic side) when kicking ass, she usually also looks convincing. She's a little bit less convincing when required to convey emotion or even friendliness, but face it: you are not going to watch The Doorman for anything other than the ass-kicking and shooting. (In that sense, the overall banality of the narrative is perhaps aside the point.) Sometimes the fights are a bit over-edited, but they generally remain watchable and violent enough to keep you awake (rather unlike much of Force of Nature). Ruby Rose, in any event, and as she already proved in flicks like John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017 / trailer), is convincing when it comes to action and as such is a name to watch if you like the genre. 

Jean Reno (of The Last Battle [1983 / trailer]) looks a bit bloated and bored, but he does at times look like he is trying to act. Norwegian actor Aksel Hennie (of Terkel in Trouble [2004 / trailer]), as second-tier baddy Borz, does perhaps the best job in the movie, sliding believably between friendliness and cold-heartedness, smile and dead-face. He gets the only thing that comes close to skin scene, and though he does keep his towel wrapped tight to hide the family jewels, his general physical appearance could cause a drop or two of saliva in some viewers. (We, for one, promptly took matters into our own hands.) He often steals the given scene he's in, even when fully clothed, and by the final resolution he also proves himself to be an even bigger asshole than you think he is.

As for the direction, well, the genre-flexible director Ryûhei Kitamura may not be in top form in The Doorman — see: The Midnight Meat Train (2008 / trailer) — and he does rely a bit too much on quick edits, but he still does a decent job and keeps the movie rolling at a relatively quick pace (excluding the interminable family-bonding scenes, that is).

To be blunt, The Doorman is hardly special in any way, despite a nice fight scene here and there and a few decent deaths. If you have nothing else to do and the movie is at hand, it makes for painless and passable viewing. To paraphrase what we said about Force of Nature: decades ago, in the fun days of grindhouse, a movie like this would have had the redeeming features of fun stuff like spurting fake-looking blood and flying fake-looking body parts and a lot of gratuitous real-looking naked love pillows (see, for example, Ilse, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks [1976]). The Doorman, however, made, as it was, totally in line with today's prudery and overwhelming desire not to offend, has none of those cheaply gratifying aspects... to its detriment. 

And thus The Doorman remains watchable in an unmemorable way: it's simply by-the-number, action-flick fluff that is fun enough with beers and/or a bong, but neither original enough or extreme enough to prevent it from being quickly forgotten after the final credits role. Nothing to avoid, per say, but nothing to really bother searching for — unless, of course, you're a fan of Ruby Rose. Then, obviously enough, one can truly say she's done far worse movies than this slab of commonplace action-genre product.