A good action movie should always keep your attention – keep your eyes glued to the screen. But when they forget this, you end up with a long slog that won’t keep you pulled into the story. Unfortunately, the new Lionsgate release Pursuit seems to have fallen into that trap and is a movie that you might spend more time checking your notifications on your phone than watching the movie.
From the movie description and even poster, fans will be led to believe that it’s a John Cusack film – one where he’s the lead. Which Cusack is great at, from comedy to romance we’ve seen him succeed in those roles over the years. But while they bill him highly on the poster, the boilerplate description and more Cusack plays a pretty minor role in the film and the story in general. He’s the father of one of the main bad guys that we see in only a handful of films. So what does that leave viewers with?

The rest of the film is a weird combination of slow action scenes and a story that seems hastily patched together. A cop is on a mission to get revenge for not only the kidnapping of his wife but her death and that of their unborn child. It’s not much of a spoiler – they show this scene over and over in flashbacks. And while this is a good motivation for a story – it seems like they leaned so heavily on this that it doesn’t give much room for any other story to develop.
Pursuit is an action movie with minimal action scenes and the ones that it does have will leave you wanting more. You can tune out of the movie and check back in fifteen minutes later and not miss major chunks of the story since not much has happened. It seems like it’s a made for television movie on an off-channel that will be played late at night just to fill time.
Can the star power of John Cusack save this film? Probably not.
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About Pursuit:

John Cusack (Grosse Pointe Blank) and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild) star in this action thriller about a tough cop’s hunt for an even tougher criminal. Detective Breslin crosses paths with Calloway (Hirsch), a ruthless hacker desperate to find his wife, who has been kidnapped by a drug cartel. When Calloway escapes police custody, Breslin joins forces with a no-nonsense female cop to reclaim his prisoner. But is Calloway’s crime-boss father (Cusack) somehow involved in this explosive situation?