MARY NO GREAT HIT

OPENING weekend will probably benefit from the popularity of star Taraji P Henson, but the drop-off should be steep for Babak Najafi’s uninspired crime flick about a hit woman caring for the boy she made an orphan.

Henson plays the titular Mary, a killer in the inner circle of a Boston gang led by Danny Glover’s Benny. A year earlier, while assassinating a gambler who owed Benny money, Mary realised the man had a son in the room next door. She left without letting the boy see her and, guilt-ridden, kept watch on him from afar.

Well, guilt-ridden up to a point. She didn’t care enough to rescue the newly minted orphan when he fell in with a Russian gangster who beat him routinely; she didn’t keep him from running drugs; she didn’t feed him when he went hungry; only once young Danny (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) winds up unconscious in an alley does she come to his aid.

What the screenplay counts on is that putting the killer in charge of a tyke is novel enough to win us over. But the script completely fails to transmute the

vulnerability and anger Orphan Danny feels into love via extended scenes of smart-ass bickering.

The boy gives Mary lip; Mary gives him what-for; repeat until someone realises there’s not much chemistry between Henson and Winston and gives up.

Proud Mary’s climactic bloodbath plays like a half-hearted music video made to advertise a more exciting film.

– Hollywood Reporter