Pun Salad

There are probably hundreds of better free-to-me movies I could have watched off my Roku. Heck, I've got dozens of better movies on DVD. But, come on, who could resist this Netflix blurb:

Jessica Alba! I first saw her in the Dark Angel TV series back in 2000! After doing some math… she was 19. Now she's 43. She's remarkably well-preserved.

The other big name is Anthony Michael Hall. When his name shows up in the opening credits, it's a safe bet he's playing the kingpin bad guy.

Anyway, it's pretty clichéd. Ms. Alba plays "Parker", who is pretty close to a female Jack Reacher, with a preference for edged weaponry. After an opening scene where she disposes of some Middle East generic terrorists, she's informed that her dad was killed in a cave-in in his beloved mine. So she goes back to America to deal with that. But (of course) he was murdered, because he found out about the evil doings of the Swann family, involving the theft of weaponry from a local military depot, supplying criminals and domestic terrorists.

The filmmakers were not overly worried about putting together a coherent plot, but I stayed awake. There is an amusing scene in a hardware store where Ms. Alba takes on some bad guys. One of the bad guys tries to defeat her by picking up a chain saw off the rack, which for some reason is all gassed up and ready to run. No, I do not remember why the bad guys were in the store, nor what happened to them.