High Heat

It is opening night at the Etolle Rouge, a high end French restaurant owned by Ray (Don Johnson) and the much younger Ana Abrumov (Olga Kurylenko) who is also the chef in charge of the kitchen staff. She micro manages the staff. Ray has arranged some publicity for the establishment. Ana is not pleased as she has a past in the KGB. We discover Ray owes Dom (Dallas Page) a large sum of money. Dom wants to burn the place down for the insurance so he can recover his loss. Ana has other ideas. She calls on a frenemy Mimi (Kaitlin Doubleday) for help. Mimi is debating if she should help or kill Ana. She takes along with her her husband (Chris Diamantopoulos) and twin teen daughters for the hit. They don't trust the girls at home alone. The film was more comedy than action. In one scene the twins look like something out of "The Shining." The dialogue, especially the couple in the car, was humorous. I enjoyed the film. I had a few good laughs which is more than some of the comedies out there. Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity.

I feel awful only rating this at a 2 because I love Olga Kurylenko. But either this was a payday movie for her, or she thought it was going to be funny. She was wrong on the funny part. I actually thought it was supposed to be a thriller when I first put it on, and it took me a while to work out that it was a spoof. The comedic elements were just not funny, I didn't even smile once during the entire film. The high action parts were badly done and didn't convince me that an ex KGB agent was killing everyone with cold, steely determination. I gave it 2 stars and 1 of them was for Kurylenko's butt in her leather pants, the other for Doubleday's funny all American Mom assassin presentation. The film is an utter flop even at less than an hour and a half which felt like 3. Don't waste your time on it.

As I stumbled upon the 2022 action comedy "High Heat", here late in 2022, I had never heard about the movie. But seeing that the movie had Don Johnson and Olga Kurylenko on the cast list, and having read the movie's synopsis, I was actually having some expectations for the movie. And now as the movie has come to and end, I am sitting here with an overwhelming sensation of having been cheated out of something grander and somewhat having been wasting my time on a subpar movie. Writer James Pedersen didn't exactly churn out a grand script here for director Zach Golden to work with. Sure, "High Heat" was watchable and had good production value to it, but the storyline was rather flaccid. It was nice definintely nice to watch Don Johnson and Olga Kurylenko in the leading roles, but they didn't have a wholesome script to work with. And I have to say that the option for bringing on Dallas Page to play the main bad guy in the movie wasn't exactly a stroke of genius. "High Heat" came and went without leaving a lasting impression, and it is a movie that will slowly, quietly, but surely, dwindle into the mists of oblivion and never be brought out and viewed as second time. It was, in fact, a rather forgettable and sort of pointless action comedy. My rating of "High Heat" lands on a four out of ten stars.

Olga Kurylenko and Don Johnson were really good in this. Yes there was some tongue in cheek humor, but the action sequences were also pretty darn great! The villian's and the writing of those villain's could have been better for sure, but that's not what the movie was about. A previous reviewer made a comparison to Ramsey's kitchen meets Die Hard... that sounds pretty darn accurate. If you want to be entertained by some great actors and the gorgeous Olga Kurylenko, then this movie is for you. I don't get all of the bad reviews I'm seeing. I gave this a solid 8... I wanted to give it a 10 to make up for all of the haters on this one. I enjoyed this! Thank you.