With Final Score, Dave Bautista has re-teamed the director of his quickly-forgotten Heist for yet another cheap-o action-thriller seemingly made just to fill Walmart’s remaining DVD bargain bins.
Loosely Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death relocated to a different sports arena, the film sees Bautista as the one man standing between terrorists and the stadium they want to blow up. As some kind of thinly-defined military bad-ass amongst the 35,000 hostages trapped in a locked-down soccer venue, it’s Bautista who gets the call when vaguely Eastern European lead terrorist Ray Stevenson reveals his terms: capture Pierce Brosnan, who’s also in the stadium, or they’re going to blow it up in 90 minutes. Also, they’ve kidnapped Bautista’s niece, which seems a bit superfluous given the weight of the situation already, but sure. It’s also unclear why the paramilitary terrorists can’t just hunt down Brosnan themselves, or just blow up the stadium to begin with and be done with him, but again, sure; he probably has a hard drive or a code or whatever.
Similarly unclear: whether Final Score will hit theaters or just head straight to a little silver Sylvania TV-DVD combo kept on a beat-up dresser in a living room.
