Dermot Mulroney channels his inner Liam Neeson for action flick Ruthless

Last Updated on November 21, 2023

Dermot Mulroney – action hero? Could happen.

I ran a piece not long ago asking where the new action heroes are. Some of our legends, like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Liam Neeson, are well into their seventies and slowing down. An odd quirk of modern action fans is that they tend to prefer their heroes on the older side. Think of the biggest action stars out there. Are there any under fifty? With Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves busy in A-list action, there’s a lot of room in the second-tier category, and now Dermot Mulroney, a rom-com perennial from the nineties, is dipping his toe into the genre with his new film, Ruthless.

In the new trailer, which Saban just put out, Mulroney plays a high school coach with a specific “set of skills” and a bad temper. When one of his favourite students gets abused by her dad, the man gets a bad beating, with Mulroney snapping his arm like a twig. But, when a few of his students get abducted into a human trafficking ring (run by 80s/90s icon Jeff Fahey), Mulroney goes on the warpath.

Here’s the official synopsis:

Harry (Dermot Mulroney) is a high school wrestling coach recovering from the loss of his daughter, who was murdered in a brutal attack. When one of his students disappears under conditions eerily similar to his daughter’s, Harry takes matters into his own hands to hunt down the men responsible for her kidnapping and will stop at nothing to rescue her from their human trafficking operation.

While it looks and sounds a bit low rent, there’s nothing wrong with a cheaper action flick, as long as it’s done correctly. Director Art Camacho has been in the business for a long time, and Saban is one of the better indie companies putting out movies like this. It’s the involvement of Mulroney that puts this one on my radar. I always liked him as a leading man, going back to Young Guns, and it will be fun to see him do some action. Who knows – maybe he’ll be a natural. I like seeing guys like him and Aaron Eckhart doing movies like this. However, I wish the lower-budget stuff was given a bit more polish, with many of these directors expected to work miracles on tiny budgets with next to no time to shoot. I might give this one a shot based on Mulroney’s involvement alone.