Shock Gauntlet
The
feature opens with Jean-Jacques ‘J.J.’ Levasseur (Chiwitel Ejiofor) in his prison
cell sitting quietly and then getting hassled to his feet when some guards show
up and tell him to come with them for his parole hearing. The guards are pretty rough with him and call
him ‘hero’ in a very sarcastic tone.
They get him to the parole board and sit him down. The parole board gives a long authoritative
speech that provides the audience with all the exposition it needs. This is intercut with actual flashbacks to
J.J.’s crime.
We learn from
the speechifying and flashbacks that J.J. is Canadian Special Forces guy who
was back home from Afghanistan in North Montreal visiting with his brother Marc
(played by rap star T.I.) and his mother.
They were all celebrating that J.J. was going to be given some big medal
and are on their way back from dinner when a riot over a hockey game breaks out
and they get caught in the middle of it.
Two of the riot cops, Luc Pignon (played by
Roy Dupuis) and Disco Donnie (played by Mads Mikelson wearing big shiny aviator rim glasses), just
pointlessly tackles Marc and J.J. and cuff them. J.J. keeps telling Marc to stay calm and it
will sort itself out, but Marc keeps mouthing off at the cops about how they
did nothing wrong. Luc gets annoyed and
pulls out his knightstick and clubs Marc full force
in the nuts, he then throws up and passes out.
J.J. snaps and shows extreme flexibility getting his handcuffed hands
over his head and around front and beats Disco Donnie and Luc to the ground and
steals their cop car and uses it to drive Marc to the hospital. At the hospital the doctor comes out tells
him that Marc is alive, but they had to amputate both his nuts. The doctor invites J.J. to come see his
brother, who is unconscious, and upon leaving the hospital room J.J. sees that
a SWAT team has gathered in the hallway.
We cut back to
the present, where after five years in prison for assaulting an officer and
grand theft auto, J.J. is now up for special work parole. He is released on the condition that he work up North as a seal clubber. He’ll be paid, but isn’t allowed to leave the
village where he’ll be working.
We cut to the
cold North where J.J. starts working and is obviously miserable in his
task. He works with a bunch of other
hillbilly sadists who make him sick. He
notices that they aren’t killing the seals in a humane way and shows them a way
to strike clean and kill in one hit, but they just ignore him. So he starts working faster and doing all
sorts of spins and fancy moves to kill the seals quickly and humanely before
the other convicts get to them. Soon
enough the other guys just sit around and watch J.J. as he moves like a ninja
and marvel at his cat-like agility.
One day they
see a military helicopter fly by overhead and shortly after a military attaché comes to get J.J. and escorts him to a log cabin. There he meets Canadian Governor General Michaelle Jean (played by Beyonce). She says a bunch of really obvious superhero
movie talk stuff about how the “people need heroes” and blah blah blah. She tells him she’s used her influence to get
him released from this duty so that he can return to Montreal and clean up the
city. She gives him a contact card for a
McGill University professor named Thaddeus Krane and
instructs J.J. to meet with him once he’s returned home.
We cut back to
Montreal, J.J. returns to find his mother is a sad broken old Haitian immigrant
and his brother, Marc, has become a heroine-addicted eunuch who only comes home
on alternate nights because he frequently passes out in the street. J.J. tails Marc and watches him hustle for
money and eventually go into a strip club.
J.J. waits outside and sees Marc coming back out, but as he leaves he
bumps into the cops who castrated him, Luc Pignon and
Disco Donnie, and a small posse of other cops heading into the strip club. They taunt him about what a guy with no balls
would get out of going to a strip club.
They then discover that he was buying heroine there and briefly play keepaway with the stash before giving it back to him and
shoving him out of the way.
The cops go
into the strip club and come out really quickly, so J.J. knows they weren’t
there for entertainment. After they
leave J.J. goes in and requests a private room with one of the strippers, Kristen
(played by Mila Kunis). The next scene will be in the private cabin
room where Kristen asks him what he wants and he whispers “Information.”
J.J. whispers questions and Kristen lapdances him
while whispering the answers. She tells
him that the cops sell drugs to the strip club, which then sells them to
junkies. She heard something about a big
deal the next Thursday. She says she
hates drugs and she just wants place where she can dance and earn a living.
J.J. pays her
well and leaves. He goes over to McGill
University where he finds Professor Thaddeus Krane
(played by newsman Peter Mansbridge). Professor K says he’s been expecting him and
unveils a motorcycle that shoots rockets and a bunch of other various Batman
type goodies such as armour and a modified retractable version of his seal
club.
He follows
Kristen’s advice and goes to the docks and sure enough, sees a vessel with a
bunch of smugglers and the gang of corrupt cops pull up to do the deal. J.J. does a motorcycle stunt and lands on the
ship’s deck and starts riding around on the deck wielding his club and cracking
open the smugglers’ heads. Luc manages
to zap J.J. with his taser and J.J. falls off his
motorcycle and over the edge of the ship and into the sea but his motorcycle misfires a rocket that sets the deck of the ship
ablaze. The cops quickly load the drugs
from the ship into a cop paddywagon and start driving
to flee the scene.
J.J. recovers
from the shock and climbs out of the sea and gets his motorcycle up and starts
chasing them. Disco Donnie drives while
the others shoot at J.J. with various firearms.
J.J. sees that they are approaching the police station and the cops say
to each other “We’re almost home free, boys!”
J.J.
launches a rocket from his motorcycle that flies into the back of the paddywagon and explodes, propelling the flaming paddywagon through the air and into the police station
where it explodes in a giant chalky fog of crack that gets blown through the
air. Luc manages to put on a spare gas
mask and run out into the street firing his pistol at J.J. We get some shots of the cops in the station
all gasping and choking on the drugs they’re inhaling and J.J. rides off.
J.J. rides back home and sleeps and then in the morning goes to Professor K’s
lab. J.J. says he’s going to be going up
against cops, so he needs armour that can deflect taser
zappings.
Professor K says he’s already done one better: he made armour that can
absorb the shock and send it back out.
We then get
several intercut scenes of J.J. doing various unrelated vigilante things like
stopping rapes etc and scenes of Luc meeting with his father who is a Captain
in the police force and who scolds Luc for bringing this much attention to
their dirty operation. Luc blasts back
at his father that his friends have been turned into ‘freaks’ by the incident
and that they will smoke out the perpetrator.
Luc’s incorrect but reasonable theory is that somebody’s trying to cut
out the middleman.
We learn that
the cops who all inhaled the fog of drugs became instant superjunkies
who now look kinda like vampires with really pale
waxy skin and bloodshot eyes. They all
have to walk around with backpacks that have IV units keeping their bodies full
of drugs and hydrating them.
Luc and his
pack of corrupt superjunky cops all go to the strip
club and start tearing the place up and accusing the owner of a leak or of
treachery. The owner takes offence to
the allegations and calls in his bouncers and bodyguards but the cops all have
superhuman strength from living on a constant crack overdose. The cops launch the bodyguards across the
room with a single arm and punch their heads off and all sorts of crazy shit
like that.
The strip club
owner pulls a machine gun out from under the bar and starts taking cover and
popping up from behind the booths around the strip club. Eventually Disco Donnie pulls a bar stool out
of the floor and uses it as a club to smash up all the booths until he find the
owner and beats his head in, ending the suspense. But then all the lights go down and a
silhouette steps onto the stage and then the lights go back up to reveal it’s
J.J. with two uzis and he starts shooting up the
cops. His bullets rupture the I.V.
backpacks hydrating them and injecting them with crack and their bodies petrify
and J.J. shatters them with his seal club.
Kristen the stripper is in the control booth fading the lights in and
out to help J.J. by strategically blinding the cops and obscuring J.J.’s
position.
Donnie takes a
swing with his tazer at J.J., who absorbs the shock
and uses his special armour to blast Donnie’s flaming body across the room and
at the wall behind the bar where he shatters all the bottles and the alcohol
gushes onto Donnie causing the flames to enrage and the whole club is on
fire. J.J. lets Luc escape in order to
save Kristen.
Luc manages to
be the only one of the corrupt cops to escape by diving out a second story
window and landing on the windshield of his own car, shattering the windshield,
crawling through the broken windshield into the driver’s seat and driving off
like a madman ranting and raving and shitting his pants. We cut to a scene later at the station where
a medic is pulling the glass out of his back and his father, Captain Pignon, enters and leans on Luc’s back to cause him agony
while scolding him for further fucking things up. Luc squeals that he now knows it wasn’t the
strip club owner trying to cut them out as middleman, he says he recognized the
vigilante’s moves and knows who it is.
Luc then hunts
down J.J.’s brother Marc, who is passed out in alley from doing drugs, brutally
kills him and drives with Marc’s corpse in the passenger’s seat really slowly
into the Haitian neighbourhood with the siren on his cop car blasting really
loudly so that everybody hears him coming.
He stops and kicks Marc’s cut up dead body into the street and peels out
at top speed while calling in backup saying there’s a riot in progress, which
quickly does happen.
The cops and
civilians are all fighting in the streets while Luc observes from a rooftop
waiting for J.J. to arrive. Which he does. J.J.
moves through the crowd shooting lightening from his hands back at the riot
cops who try to tazer him while he tells the
civilians to just go home. Luc fires
tear gas grenades that physically impact J.J. audibly cracking his ribs. The two have a brutal fight, first with Luc’s
knightstick versus J.J.’s seal club, then with fists
until J.J. dominates Luc, picks up the tear gas grenade launcher and shoves the
business end into Luc’s mouth and blows a tear gas grenade right into Luc’s
brain. The scene ends with an artsy shot
of a single tear coming out of Luc’s eye.
We then get the
movie wrap-up with J.J. meeting the Governor General again in her limo and
talking about his great progress. They
pour champagne and toast to this operation and then look out the limo window to
see Luc’s father, Captain Pignon, exiting the police
station and getting into his car, which then explodes and they clink their
glasses together.
If you liked this shit, then check out this other
shit:
Here’s this Jet Li vehicle
I wrote up.
Try to count the reasons
it would never get made.
Here’s this car chase
movie I wrote since I don’t get to see King
of the Mountain.
Here’s a treatment for a
psychic gangster revenge movie.