Review by C.J. Bunce
If you read the Victor Gischler novel Gun Monkeys, published as Fast Charlie and reviewed here in May, you are going to be very surprised when you watch the movie adaptation, now streaming on Hulu. It is practically unrecognizable from the book. From the location in Florida to the very heart of the story, to the long road movie sequences, changed characters and characteristics of those characters, and the very active lead anti-hero, Fast Charlie the movie is a very odd thing, indeed. As an adaptation, it’s a major disappointment. If you want to view the movie as a standalone, then you’ll want to focus on leads Pierce Brosnan and Morena Baccarin. Brosnan does a fine job as a hitman that makes it to 70–a pretty impossible feat–in a decent Old Man trope performance to follow his equally good performance in The Foreigner (reviewed here). And Baccarin gets her first opportunity to play a layered character, which she also does well. But ultimately this one is forgettable, likely to be remembered only for being the film with the final performance of James Caan.
We don’t really know Charlie Swift’s age, but we do know Pierce Brosnan was pushing 70 when he made the movie. In the book, his physical actions couldn’t be done by anyone in their 60s, let along 70s. This is accounted for with Brosnan cast in the role, as those scenes are just excised from the script. Brosnan’s Charlie uses other men to do his work, especially David Chattam as “Milt,” a guy who shares Charlie’s work ethic and past. Brosnan is no Liam Neeson, who has been chalking up the Old Man roles, and it’s probably a good thing nobody tried to fake it here.
Where the novel is a modern-day Charley Varrick without the heists, this is like the re-creation of one of the seedier (aren’t they all?) episodes of City Confidential. This is a still a mob story, where Fast Charlie is the #2 guy under James Caan’s Stan. But this Stan isn’t getting pushed out of his leadership position in his comfortable crime nook in Florida, he’s on his way to a retirement home, and the story was relocated to Mississippi for no discernible reason. In the novel Stan has been keeping a couple sets of books and the FBI gets wind of the operation just as Stan and his entire swarm of thugs are getting wiped out. The FBI barely plays into the movie, and we meet none of the FBI characters from the book.
Instead we get a story about loyalty, and that’s where Brosnan sells his character. Charlie is loyal to Stan for good reasons, many would say to a fault–the point of the book. The movie is just sad–it leans into Caan left to play this kind of role, a sad real-life reality that is left out in the open, and takes away from the plot of the book. The genre beats from Burn Notice, including the mom and the little brother are completely gone. That show’s Sharon Gless makes an appearance, but it’s too brief and beneath her skillset.
Charlie picks up a girlfriend along the way, a taxidermy artist that seems wedged into the story for the sake of having a quirky girlfriend. That’s true in both the book and the movie, but Baccarin manages to make her quirky career choice a little more meaningful. Baccarin and Brosnan as a couple doesn’t quite work even on paper, and only works in the movie if you see the actors behind the roles. But she does get a good scene where she saves herself from two thugs instead of needing to be rescued by the man. And Charlie gets a good scene getting out of a fix using a trick that is somehow straight out of the Final Destination movies, using a beer bottle and an airbag.
At least this Charlie has motivation for all his kills, something the anti-hero of the novel was missing. The contrast between what Brosnan had in his James Bond days and this character are contained in a scene where he is trapped in a vent–mirroring a similar but altogether different outcome from Bruce Willis at the height of his career in Die Hard. And I was actually pleased with Chattam’s role in this thin script.
I enjoyed Fast Charlie the book simply because it requires the reader to get active following Charlie and his long journey. The movie isn’t the same shoot ’em up crime story, but a quieter reflection on old age, even in the mob world. Fast Charlie, the movie, is now streaming on Hulu.
