Why the makers of 'Proud Mary' should be ashamed

Proud Mary commits the biggest cardinal sin a genre movie can make -- it's boring. And that's a shame, because the idea of Taraji P. Henson as a badass action hero is a great one, but this film lets her down (and the audience) unlike any movie I've seen recently.

It all starts promising enough, with a soul infused opening credit sequence with recalls the best Pam Grier vehicles of the 1970s, but fairly quickly devolves into an incredibly passive, aggressively un-fun movie, and I am mystified as to why. It so easily could have been, at the very least, a guilty pleasure.

Henson is not just a stunning woman, she is an interesting actress. Hidden Figures proved that with the right material she is a bonafide movie star.  But in Proud Mary she is saddled with a pretty annoying little kid she has to essentially babysit (played by a child actor who looks incredibly similar to a young Chris Rock) and a character that is ill-defined and whose every decision barely makes sense.

Perhaps because of tax credits, this movie is set in Boston -- but instead of using the locale to give the movie flavor or context it's just there to provide bland establishing shots to interrupt the monotony of the many, many scenes between Henson and the kid.

I suppose this film wants to be a kind of urbanized version of The Professional with Henson in the Jean Reno role, but there is so little action or suspense in this movie that the melodrama can't hold our interest. In fact, the real lead of this movie is the child actor -- who is repeatedly left alone in a luxury apartment full of lethal weapons and, in a particularly tasteless sequence, totes a gun while clad in a hoodie.

There is one very fun scene late in the movie, set to the tune of the Ike and Tina Turner classic which gives the film its name. In this brief rock 'em, sock 'em action scene the movie seemed to deliver on the promise made in its trailer and opening credits. It's a silly scene, but an unabashedly fun one.

Unfortunately, the movie then snaps right back into its amateurish rhythm, with a normally welcome veteran like Danny Glover (looking feeble and uncomfortably like Bill Cosby) delivering one of the most listless performances of his career.

This is just a profoundly strange movie. It is full of boneheaded decision-making, poorly defined roles and tedious table-setting. Yet, I was rooting for it because the reality is, the fact that Henson (who also served as a producer) got this financed in the first place is a success in its own right.

Coming on the heels of the disappointing Atomic Blonde and in advance of the upcoming Red Sparrow with Jennifer Lawrence, its worth noticing that Hollywood is trying mightily to carve out more of a space for women action stars, but looking and acting cool is not a substitute for strong action scenes and a narrative that you can get even a little bit invested in.

Ironically, before the opening credits rolled on Proud Mary at the Alamo Drafthouse I saw it at, there was a trailer for the Grier classic Coffy, which is a profane and problematic movie but also a wildly entertaining one. That 70's film should have provided a perfect blueprint for Proud Mary but instead we're stuck with a forgettable, directionless mess that, despite being very early in the year, will likely go down as one of the worst movies of 2018.