Blackout

Featuring all the trademarks of a throwaway action thriller, Blackout centers around an undercover DEA agent (Josh 'Tad Hamilton' Duhamel) who awakes in the hospital with no memory but with gangsters searching for something he stole from them. Set entirely within a Mexican hospital, which has a scarcity of nurses, doctors, and other patients, but seemingly no end to henchmen who are sent after our amnesiac like fodder (often forgetting the need to capture our protagonist alive).

A few other familiar faces are slumming it here including Abbie Cornish as a woman's whose motives for helping our hero are murky and Nick Nolte as our agent's boss ready to bring the cavalry (even if it is too late to be of much assistance). And Bárbara de Regil is cast as a perhaps the hospital's only nurse in a role that the script keeps forgetting about.

While dumb action films can be fun, Blackout delivers plenty of dumb without much fun. I usually enjoy the amnesiac on the run attempting to put the pieces together, but there's just not that much here for our character to learn in a setting that confines the action as much as the character. The mysterious case our baddies are searching for proves to be as disappointing as the rest of the film when its contents are eventually revealed. Some late eye-rolling twists certainly don't do the film any favors either. Blackout is a completely forgettable affair that even at only 81 minutes is still at least an hour too long.

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• Title: Blackout
• IMDb: link