It's a Kevin James film so if anyone knows anything about this guy's history of films someone would probably walk into this film not expecting a great deal of out it and would only watch it out of boredom or not being happy with the other choices they currently have available to them. I am going through such a drought at the moment and it is why I decided to give this one a chance.
I don't know if it was just because I don't really expect much out of Kevin James so the bar is already so low in my mind, but I actually enjoyed this film.
Released in 2016 as a Netflix exclusive which was almost certainly at least in part due to Adam Sandler's friendship, this film actually has a pretty decent backstory.
Kevin James plays the role of Sam Larson who has a boring office job but aspires to be an author. He draws a lot of his background material from a guy that he plays pool with when he write a book called "Memoirs of an International Assassin" about a fictional person. When a publisher picks up the rights to the book they release it as non-fiction and while it is not expressly stated anywhere in the book, the character of "The Ghost" is assumed by many readers to actually be the real life Sam Larson.
Sam does fantasize about being the assassin and he thoroughly researches all aspects of his book but in real life he is a timid desk jockey. This all goes horribly wrong for him when he is kidnapped one day and taken to Venezuela as a group of dangerous people believe that he is fact is "The Ghost" because "The Ghost" actually was a real person and is famous in that country.
Basically from that point forward Sam finds himself in increasingly dangerous situations that due to no action of skill of his own for the most part, he ends up getting out of which furthers the underground notion that he is in fact the real "Ghost" and we as viewers start to wonder the same. I think this is one of the saving graces of this film compared to other James films because most of his movies simply rely on making fun of the fact that he is fat and that gets old pretty fast.
To be a bit pervy for a second I will also say that it probably didn't hurt the watchability of this movie very much when they cast the absolutely stunning Zulay Henao as Sam Larson's accomplice, DEA agent Bolivar.
The movie has a bunch of action, but it isn't an action film. It has a lot of comedic elements but it isn't too silly and all-encompassing like we have come to expect from those awful Mall Cop films that for some reason there are 2 of!
Is this movie amazing? No it definitely isn't an as I said the really sexy co-star and the fact that James' past films have made me expect very little from him or his future endevors but I have to admit that I was entertained for 90 minutes while watching this and that is good enough for me.