Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Bricklayer’ on Netflix, a Sloppy Spy Thriller Starring Aaron Eckhart

The Bricklayer (now on Netflix) pairs director Renny Harlin with star Aaron Eckhart, and it’s kind of a perfect partnership: The former peaked in the ’90s (with Die Hard 2, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Cliffhanger) before becoming a prolific director of B-level action films in the last decade-plus. The latter became a rock-solid lead or co-lead in the 2000s (The Dark Knight, Thank You for Smoking, No Reservations) before settling into a Liam Neesonesque career track, anchoring a number of B-level action films in recent years. There’s no debating either guy’s acumen, so the film’s success relies on the strength of its screenplay, which adapts writer Noah Boyd’s novel of the same name into, you guessed it, a B-level action film. Whether it succeeds on those modest terms is the primary concern here, so let’s get into it.

THE BRICKLAYER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This guy, Radek (Clifton Collins Jr.), he wears quite the cocked fedora atop his head. You might ask if the hat is rakish, and to that I’d reply, have you ever known a cocked fedora to not be rakish? It’s certainly indicative of an ego, or someone up to no good, and indeed, Radek has been roaming Thessaloniki, Greece, murdering journalists and framing the CIA as the culprit. This is a prime example of Having Beef – see, Radek is a former CIA asset whose daughter and pregnant wife were murdered after his cover went bye-bye, and now he wants revenge. Back in the U.S., we meet CIA agent Kate (Nina Dobrev), who’s been tasked with tracking down Radek; she’s perfect for the gig because she has no life and works day and night, and also stirs her coffee with a Twizzler, although which of these two positive qualities about her character is more valuable is highly debatable. 

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia: Vail (Eckhart) hops off a bus and onto a job site, where he lays out his trowel and level and all that, and gets to some serious mu’fu’in bricklayin’. He’s meticulous and detailed, a total artiste of the bricklaying profession. Now, I’ve never met anyone who’s really into bricks, but this guy, he’s really really into bricks. Does he see bricklaying as a metaphor for life and work? I’m not saying, because I might end up stepping all over Vail’s big philosophical third-act speech, if such a thing should exist, which I’m not saying it does, but if you know anything about movie cliches, well, the question answers itself. Anyway, Vail is a retired CIA op and former close friend of Radek, which makes him ripe for the gig. CIA honcho O’Malley (Tim Blake Nelson) wants to pair him with Vail and send them to Greece, but Vail, y’know, he ain’t like that no more. He’s just a bricklayer now, and all he wants to do is lay bricks. (And listen to jazz. He’s really into jazz, too. He’s so sophisticated!) It takes Vail being nearly killed by assassins – one of whom he chokes with his tape measure, which you’ll no doubt note is an invaluable bricklayer’s tool – to convince him to take the gig, so off he goes.

So, just when he thought he was out… and you can fill in the blanks of the rest of this cliche. As soon as Vail and the relatively green Kate get to Greece, he takes them right off the CIA plan and goes rogue-ish, which is how he would track down Vail. Kate, of course, is critical of his M.O.: “We’re going on a manhunt, not building a chimney,” she quips, which I hope is supposed to be a funny line. While Vail tracks down some old compadres – one is a greasy scumwad who lies around in the VIP section of nightclubs with hot babes running their hands through his chest hair, another is a humble nice guy in an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer wig, and then of course there’s his sexy CIA-op ex (Ilfenesh Hadera) – Kate pulls up a document on her laptop that reads “PRIVELEDGED COMMUNICATIONS ONLY.” That’s verbatim. This fictional version of the CIEH isn’t big on spelling. Can’t this shit be fixed in post? Probably, but I’m glad it isn’t, because that garners a bigger laugh than the building-a-chimney line. I dunno, whatever, since this is a movie where we just sit around waiting for The Bricklayer to trowel a dude to death while he works his way through a convoluted and obfuscatory plot. Why, you may wonder, must a master bricklayer carry such a sharp trowel? I dunno, I just write reviews, I don’t bild chinmeys.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Beekeeper kicks The Bricklayer’s ass all over the place – it was funnier, more stylish in its action sequences and far, far better written, not to mention having Jason Statham in the lead, who’s at the top of the list of actors gifted in the art of selling this type of junk. It makes me want to see more movies about the action hero disguised as the average blue-collar dude – front me some cash and I’ll gladly write The Electrician, The Handyman, The Drywall Guy and/or The Landscaper for Statham or Neeson or, what the hell, why not Schwarzenegger? And let it be known that my scripts would be adequately spellchecked.

Performance Worth Watching: Eckhart, Collins and Nelson are all wily vets; let’s give this dubious acknowledgment to Eckhart, because he bugs his eyes out on occasion while the other two work in various shades of paycheck-cashing boredom. 

Memorable Dialogue: Here you go – Vail’s uber-profound Philosophy Of The Brick: “When I hold a brick in my hand, I know exactly what it is and what it’ll do, every single time. Its form is its function.” 

Sex and Skin: Sorry, the only thing getting laid around here is a brick. 

Our Take: Growing up, I knew two individuals – two! – who pronounced “chimney” as “chimley.” I never understood why. Maybe it’s a regional dialect thing? I’d rather research and write an investigation of this linguistic quirk than sit through The Bricklayer again, since it’s a lame-ass thing that’s serious when it should be campy, and rife with brutal violence and incredible nonsense. It’s one of those movies where you’re not sure if the plot fails to make sense or if you just don’t care enough to try to make sense of it. I’m asserting the former, although the movie doesn’t inspire us to put in the effort, either.

Of course, most of us are willing to endure all kinds of plot mud if the action sequences invigorate us (case in point, Atomic Blonde, where all the virtuoso filmmaking and stuntwork trumps an utterly impenetrable story). But The Bricklayer, slick as it can be at times, is so generic, you expect it to be wrapped in a sparse black-and-white label reading ACTION MOVIE – NO ADDITIVES, NO PRESERVATIVES. Eckhart does the low grumbly voice of The Man Who’s Seen It All, Dobrev guts out a role that renders her the most inept CIA agent of all time so the title hero can save her butt, and neither seems particularly compelled to hard-sell this half-assed material. 

Meanwhile, the audience gets bored, wading through a plot weighed down by unnecessary complications to get to mediocre fights, shootouts and car chases in which the good guys fire headshots and the bad guys can’t successfully hit the sky with a bullet, and things explode for no logical reason. There’s one unintentionally funny sequence in which our guy the Bricklayer gets his head slammed into a brick wall once, twice, thrice, four times, and he just shrugs it off. A brick wall cannot concuss the Bricklayer, for he is one with the brick. He is the brick and the brick is he. This movie has brix in its damn hed. 

Our Call: I understand that “privileged” is a tough one to spell. I stumble on it regularly. But that doesn’t mean we should forgive The Bricklayer for such boneheadedness – it’s thoroughly inept. SCIP ITT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.