“One-man army” films are in vogue right now, but this is not a new trend. When Westerns were at the peak of their popularity, you had several stories of a highly trained gunslinger who had been wronged in some way out for blood, with actors like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne at the helm. Back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Jean-Claude Van Damme would headline movies about a guy who was out to get revenge for personal, professional, or nationalistic reasons. And while mainstream cinema refused to use such narratives for a while until Keanu Reeves became John Wick, that trend was kept alive in the direct-to-video releases by immensely talented artists like Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, and Michael Jai White. Recently, well-known faces like Orlando Bloom, Tom Hardy, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Jennifer Lopez have entered this space and achieved varying degrees of success. Josh Duhamel has been trying to do the same for the past 5-6 years, and with Off the Grid, he has finally arrived.
Johnny Martin’s Off the Grid, written by Jim Agnew, tells the story of Jack, who is living a life of anonymity in Memphis, Tennessee. He has a heavily guarded bunker that looks penetrable but isn’t at all, actually. He has an off-road bike, which he regularly uses to travel to the aforementioned town to replenish his supplies. He tries not to talk to too many people, but a budding scientist, Chase, and a bartender, Josey, take a liking to him for reasons that are not clear to anybody (not even the audience). But why does Jack live like this? Well, 19-20 years ago, Jack used to work for a company called Belcor Industries. He sensed something fishy going down there. So, he took all his research and bailed, thereby tanking Belcor’s dreams of doing something truly “revolutionary.” Since then, Belcor has been hell-bent on recapturing Jack and making him finish his project. However, when a hack leads to the leak of confidential data onto the internet, Belcor tasks Jack’s ex-colleague, Ranish, and the head of security, Marcus, with hunting him down regardless of the cost. So, it’s the high-tech weaponry of Belcor’s army versus Jack’s DIY munitions. Who’ll win and who’ll lose? Well, that’s what the movie is all about.
I’m aware of the fact that DTV movies aren’t exactly famous for being high on themes, metaphors, and symbolism. But that isn’t going to stop me from doing an unnecessarily shallow analysis of what Off the Grid is “actually” about. At its core, Agnew’s take on the stories of yore is about ethics and the price that one has to pay for being moral in this day and age. It may seem like a tech company sending armed mercenaries after their employee to protect their secret is a bit too extreme, but I implore you to read the news and see that real life is actually stranger than fiction. Without naming any names (because I want to avoid a lawsuit), there are multinational corporations that are known for killing off whistleblowers and then making it look like suicide. The only exaggeration in Agnew’s script is that his upstanding whistleblower is a mixture of Tony Stark and John Rambo; hence, he knows how to fight back by using the backwoods terrain of a remote town to his benefit. Where the movie falters is that it doesn’t do a really good job of fleshing out Jack’s transformation from a man who loves his solitude into a warrior who’ll put his life and his research on the line to save the innocent. There were plenty of opportunities to do it, but Agnew failed to capitalize on any of them.
Martin and Agnew do a decent enough job of highlighting the classism prominent in the vocabulary of people who are from the city and how prejudiced they are towards their own countrymen just because they are not up-to-date about what’s latest in fashion and tech. Everything about the production design, art direction, costume design, and shot choices that are used to depict San Francisco and Memphis in Off the Grid shows how city folk have made their own lives difficult for themselves. And yet they have the audacity to look down upon those who, unlike them, are not actively contributing to the decay of the environment and societal values. That’s not integral to the plot of the movie, but I think stuff like this enriches the very basic conflict between Jack and Belcor’s minions. Coming to the technical aspects, there are some nice chase sequences, with one involving a character named Chase. All the stuff with the booby traps and handcrafted weapons is cool. The hand-to-hand combat sequences are alright; they could’ve been better, but they get the job done. The music is generic, but when coupled with the cinematography and editing, it didn’t really bother me all that much. It does have a very lazy end-credits sequence, though. What the hell happened there?
The performances in Off the Grid are pretty amazing, to be honest. Josh Duhamel aptly portrays the weight of the burden that his character has been carrying for nearly 2 decades. There aren’t any flashbacks to help him out. Even the expository dialogue isn’t expository enough to do the heavy lifting for him. He has to express it all through his body language and vocal inflections, and he is really good at it. Greg Kinnear is excellent at expressing frustration. By the end, he is an absolute laugh riot. Ricky Russert was giving off major “Severus Snape in the wild” vibes. If I am not wrong, I think that that was exactly what the filmmakers were going for. Russert is very animated and injects so much life into the film; I just wish we got to learn more about why Marcus is the way he is. Peter Stormare, Maria Elisa Camargo, Michael Zapesotsky, and the rest of the supporting cast are great. All in all, yeah, this is worth a casual watch. I mean, at the very least, it’s better than all those multi-million dollar “mockbusters” that streaming platforms keep releasing and hailing as the Second Coming of Christ. Off the Grid knows exactly what it is, and from the first frame to the last, it stays committed to entertaining you with some cheap thrills.
