In short: Seized (2020)

Our typical Man with a Violent Past who nobody calls by his old name of Nero anymore (Scott Adkins) works as a security expert somewhere in Mexico, trying not to be driven insane by his very teenage son Taylor (Matthew Garbacz) while trying to teach him better than he himself learned. There’s clearly a bit of guilt concerning the death of Taylor’s mother involved in the relationship, too, and we all can imagine what kind of thing must have gone done via obvious genre tropes.

As you’ll probably expect, Nero will have to fall back into some of his old bad habits when a mysterious guy in a cowboy hat (Mario Van Peebles, who is supposed to be Mexican, by the way, and seems to have a lot of fun) kidnaps Taylor to press our protagonist into his service. Nero just needs to massacre various Cartel heads and their men, and afterwards he’s going to get Taylor back, or so he is told.

I wish this reunion of director Isaac Florentine and low budget action king Scott Adkins could have involved a slightly more interesting script than the one Richard Lowry delivered. The pair really doesn’t need much more than a reason to set-up a series of fights – chases weren’t in the budget – but the series of clichés that makes up the film’s plot still could have used something to make them a bit more interesting, if only dialogue that’s either better at being cheesy or less cheesy. The only truly fun idea the script has is to have Van Peebles’s character stage a murder party where he and his partners and underlings watch live footage of Nero murdering his way through many a nameless thug, cheering every kill while getting drunk. That’s pretty fun and funny in a meta way, even though the film is not actually using this for anything else but as a diversion.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with the movie’s structure, though, so at least things flow well enough from action scene to action scene. The fights are all fine. They don’t exactly show the Florentine/Adkins combo at the height of their powers of creativity – there’s a sad lack of goofy martial arts movie humour here as well as a dearth of interesting places in which to beat guys up in – but middling Florentine/Adkins is still more energetic, more elegantly choreographed in its brutality than the best of what most other direct to home viewing filmmakers can deliver.