Vanquish

“There’s no need for any of this,” warns Morgan Freeman’s character in Vanquish, a threadbare crime thriller hardly worthy of his esteemed talents.

He’s right, of course. In a film this cliched and uninspired at every turn, it’s either disheartening or inspiring to watch Freeman — playing a wheelchair-bound character — bringing more complexity and nuance than his role deserves merely through facial expressions and voice inflections.

Freeman plays Damon, an aging ex-cop whose disability stems from a decades-old accident in the line of duty that left him paralyzed. Damon lives in a lavish mansion on the coast with his caretaker, Victoria (Ruby Rose), an ex-con apparently reformed under his tutelage.

However, Damon has some dirty secrets. After his law enforcement experience left him bitter and resentful, he built a fortune from shady transactions with drug dealers and Russian mobsters who still owe him some money.

So Damon blackmails Victoria into using her own background to infiltrate this criminal underbelly and become his collector. Watching the action via a body camera, Damon holds Victoria’s precocious young daughter (Juju Journey Brener) as collateral.

She becomes a pawn in a scheme motivated by greed and vengeance, realizing that her only way out requires the resilience and resourcefulness to outmaneuver criminals on all sides. Fortunately, Victoria also is handy with motorcycles and weapons, and has a knack for emerging from perilous confrontations with hardly a scratch.

In the cheesy and incoherent screenplay, the revelations about her past and other subsequent twists are inconsequential because there’s no incentive for emotional investment in the outcome.

The film is loaded with bizarre visual and narrative choices, such as repeated dissolves between shots, an overuse of color filters and slow motion, a laughably protracted opening-credit sequence, numerous pointless flashbacks, a late-night conversation with a priest in a cemetery, an interrogation apparently shot from the point-of-view of a rat, and another episode where gangsters are interrupted while watching Turkish curling.

As directed by George Gallo (Middle Men), perhaps it’s all meant to establish some sort of neon-infused noir-type mood that never comes across.

At any rate, with such cheap production values and hackneyed storytelling, Vanquish winds up more tedious than thrilling.

Rated R, 96 minutes.