The Doorman

A surprisingly tame - despite the presence of a homemade nail bomb - action thriller from Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura. The Doorman is a cheap, tension free rehash of Die Hard that fails to locate either the harried action or chromed beauty of John McTiernan's film. It's an extremely tall order, obviously, but it's Kitamura who repeatedly invites the comparison, even staging our hero's first kill in a half-completed room filled with plastic sheeting. Ruby Rose plays Ali, a shell-shocked former bodyguard who gets mixed up in an extremely slow-moving art heist. Despite a bloviating Jean Reno as the brains of the criminal outfit, Doorman numbs its audience by repeatedly eschewing pounding hyper-violence to return to a sitting room talking-heads that fails to muster any genuine threat.

Ali is a slasher killer in search of a much grimmer home video rating. The polythene wall fight briefly positions her as a phantom, invisible until she intrudes into the frame, harassing her beleaguered prey. The script harps on about secret doors and snaking passages but Kitamura's film proves largely unwilling to stage the kind of ambush kills that could really milk this conceit. The aggressive, coked-out energy the director brought to the best of his Japanese work proves largely absent here, tamed even. Like Die Hard, Doorman's best moment arrives when our hero is at a low ebb. An exhausted Ali zones out, returning to a moment in which she failed, spectacularly, to protect a child. A burning car barrels towards her, the movement built out of a repeating, tightened coverage that registers as impossible rather than impoverished. Ali's bloody face is held in almost religious awe, apparently willing the tumbling machine to collide with her and end the suffering.