Review

Any Day

Vian (Sean Bean) comforts his sister Bethley (Kate Walsh) in Any Day, a movie about an ex-boxer trying to adjust to life after prison.
Vian (Sean Bean) comforts his sister Bethley (Kate Walsh) in Any Day, a movie about an ex-boxer trying to adjust to life after prison.

An earnest, utterly predictable indie that wastes a couple of decent performances in service of a hackneyed and weak script, Any Day is less a bad film than a negligible one.

It means to be a story of redemption as it follows boxer Vian (Sean Bean) who, over the opening credits, gets drunk and kills a man with his fists. Then we're informed it's 12 years later, and Vian has just been released from prison. After being turned away from his old boxing gym, he shows up at his sister Bethley's (Kate Walsh) house, where she also initially sends him packing.

Any Day

73 Cast: Sean Bean, Kate Walsh, Tom Arnold, Nolan Gross, Eva Longoria, Shane Black, Willa Ford, Leonard Roberts, Paul Ben-Victor, Aedin Mincks, Peter Mackenzie, Joe Cortese and Melissa Bickerton

Director: Rustam Branaman

Rating: Not rated

Running time: 100 minutes

But Vian -- or Vian's legend -- has made an impression on her young son Jimmy (Nolan Gross), so she runs after Vian to offer him a place to stay. For a couple of weeks, so long as he stays off the booze.

It's not long before Vian is (awkwardly) tossing a football back and forth with Jimmy, who's playing his wingman in the grocery store while he hits (awkwardly) on Jolene (Eva Longoria).

After a couple of setbacks, the indefatigable Vian secures a job, working for amiable Roland (Tom Arnold) in his restaurant while courting mortgage broker Jolene (whom he tells he's a chef).

Things are complicated by Jolene's thuggish ex-boyfriend ( Paul Ben-Victor) and Jimmy's ongoing problems with school bullies. (They're the reason he's forever asking Uncle Vian to teach him how to fight.) Just as it looks like he's going to get his life back on track, there's an incident that shakes his newfound serenity and threatens to call out the brute in Vian.

You can probably guess how it plays out.

Any Day suffers from a low budget, but more than that it feels like an unfinished, half-baked project. While Bean is generally good, in some scenes you hear a trace of his native Irish accent; at other times, the film appears to be inexpertly dubbed. The script is simplistic and overly complicated, drawing in new characters only to abandon them, unresolved. It's simply a mess, with a script that squanders its modest but real resources.

MovieStyle on 05/01/2015

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