No, Sixty Minutes (now on Netflix) isn’t the long-running Sunday night newsmagazine whose theme music goes tickticktickticktick – it’s a German action movie that pedants will nitpick for having an 89-minute runtime. The title refers to a deadline the main character, a professional fighter played by Warrior Nun guy Emilio Sakraya, must meet lest he risk upsetting a supercute little kid, and a more accurate target for pedantry is whether this plot accurately plays out in real time. Almost a spoiler: It kind of doesn’t, but it might have enough heart and dynamic punchery-kickery to render it passable anyway.
The Gist: ABS: That’s the first shot of the movie, and they look like the kind of abs that can take a shot or 10. They belong to Octavio (Sakraya), a mixed martial arts fighter who runs his own gym and has a fight today and today is also his seven-year-old daughter’s birthday. He stares at the birthday card and doesn’t know what to write in it – or when he’ll be able to get it to her. He’s made the kid promises of a cake and a gift – a kitten, of course it’s a kitten – and an appearance at her birthday party, which happens to be occurring at the exact same time he’ll be in the ring rear-naked-choking a bloke, or getting rear-naked-choked by a bloke. These things can go either way, you know.
And if you think Octavio is between a rock and a hard place with this one, well, it’s about to get rockier and harder. He’s been a screwup of a dad, which is maybe understandable, since he was so young when she was born. Just as he’s ready to hop in the octagon, his ex calls and gives him a last-straw warning: If he lets his kid down again and isn’t at the party in [INSERT MOVIE TITLE HERE] she’s gonna file for sole custody and probably obliterate him in court like you suspect he could obliterate a guy’s face in a fight. That’s enough motivation for Octavio to turn heel right out the venue door and get the cake and cat and make it there in time. His business partner and best bud Paul (Dennis Mojen) protests, because this is a big fight and oh by the way, all these sleazewads and scumcrumbs wandering around backstage have a lot of money on this fight so he better get his ass out there and punch and kick a dude until he’s a garbage bag full of 90/10 ground sirloin.
But Octavio doesn’t care. He holds a little girl’s heart in his hands and it’s delicate and precious and he’s not gonna break it. He sets a timer for [INSERT MOVIE TITLE HERE] and out he goes, with some real angry amoral fartknockers on his tail – angry amoral fartknockers who start fights with a guy who knows how to liquify a kidney with his fists. Octavio gets some help from one of his gym trainers, Cosi (Marie Mouroum), which helps when he’s more outnumbered than the usual outnumbering, e.g., when he Bruce Lees his way through a half-dozen thugs in an alley. Eventually, the predicament gets more complicated – nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse, remember – when cops get involved, and the thugs start pulling guns, and the plot starts twisting a little. Will Our Man be able to fight through an array of crooks and betrayals and psychological baggage to get an adorable kitten to an adorable little girl? NO SPOILERS, BRUV.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Stylistically, Sixty Minutes is a Good Time wannabe, and premise-wise, it’s essentially Run Lola Run crossed with Tom Hardy MMA movie Warrior. Actually, no. Warrior is too not-flimsy. Let’s make it Cam Gigandet MMA movie Never Back Down instead.
Performance Worth Watching: The screenplay kind of fails everybody in terms of character and dialogue, but Sakraya, a real-life student of karate and kung fu, delivers uncomplicated emotions and a physically demanding performance well enough to keep the movie afloat.
Memorable Dialogue: Man, this script is bare-bones basic: “Have I always been such a mess?” Octavio asks during a dark moment, and the movie almost barely puts in the effort to kind of answer that question.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: OK, so the emphasis here isn’t really the story, which is rudimentary in structure, character and emotional content. Director Oliver Kienle banks on us being too swept up in the pedal-to-the-floor pace and copious fight sequences to care too much, which tells us more of the budget was dropped on pugilist choreography than on the writing. And that’s fine! But the caveat is, a director’s chopscocky chops had better be stellar if you want to draw favorable comparison to Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee, or even Jean-Claude Van Damme, or to blistering action spectacles like The Raid or John Wick.
Kienle’s work here isn’t quite dynamic enough to achieve full flight, or more than medium-grade exhilaration. He exhibits some visual flair in action sequences set in dance clubs, subway platforms and Euro-urban streets, and amplifies the tension with a countdown clock and an animated map outlining Octavio’s dotted-line path through the city. But even when the action tends toward hard-hitting realism – you’ll “feel” a few of these punches – it’s too often pieced together in the editing room.
Sixty Minutes does its job moderately well, generating excitement as our protagonist – who’s rash and impulsive and not always lovable, but is at least baseline relatable – dashes from point A to point B, doling out violence when necessary. Tonally, though, it’s a lost opportunity; it takes itself far too seriously for a movie that features moments of kitten endangerment and frequently stretches plausibility like a whitey-tighty waistband tied to the bumpers of two speeding Lamborghinis. If we’re prompted to laugh a little more often at the silliness of this plot, we also might not care that it gets sloppy with the tickity-tockity countdown drama, where so much happens in 12 minutes, you wonder how poor Octavio isn’t dead from exhaustion after 60. Guess his training facility is one of the best in the world at conditioning athletes.
Our Call: Sixty Minutes has its moments, but doesn’t give us enough of them to ignite our enthusiasm. So I say SKIP IT unless your boredom level is at about def con 2.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
