Kudos to screenwriter Sean Ryan. The writer, whose oeuvre is full of projects found in DVD bargain bins, penned a very interesting story in the awkwardly-titled 4GOT10. Why it wasn’t titled Forgotten, I don’t know.
The movie takes many notes from Cormac McCarthy, along with various other neo-noir flicks of the era, but cribbing is no sin. Many, many low-budget action and thriller movies have passed before these eyes, and most of those don’t have as interesting a plot. Ryan does make the mistake of piling on a twist on top of a twist at the end, but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Without spoiling anything, it’s such a bad storytelling decision that it had to have come from a producer. Only someone counting beans could see an emotional punch to the gut and then discard it thirty seconds later for bland, crowd pleasing chaff. Anyway…
From 2015, 4GOT10 was directed by Timothy Woodward Jr., and features top-billed Dolph Lundgren as DEA agent Bob Rooker. Lundgren may have gotten top billing, but he’s not the star of this movie. That duty fell to Johnny Messner, who has racked up quite a b-action filmography in his own right.
Messner plays Brian Barns. At least, that’s what his driver’s license reads. Brian has no memory of who he is. Worse, it appears his amnesia was caused by a head wound. Worse still, he appears to have been shot in the side. Even worse than that, he appears to be the only survivor of a drug deal gone bad in the middle of nowhere, No Country for Old Men-style. Nothing is getting better as, soon after Brian regains consciousness, a sheriff’s cruiser shows up on scene.
Sheriff Olson (Michael Paré) and his deputy, Sammy Perez (Michael Long), survey the bloody scene, passing over Brian, who is playing possum, and debating whether or not to steal the rather large pile of drugs and money on site. Sammy is having none of it, so Sheriff Olson shoots him in the back. Brian then stops faking being dead long 
enough to shoot Olson’s ear off, before grabbing the loot and fleeing in a van. The movie is off and running.
The DEA gets involved, and the aforementioned Agent Rooker is assigned to the case. Meanwhile, it turns out that the dead deputy was the estranged son of cartel jefe Mateo Perez (Danny Trejo). Mateo is heartbroken over his son’s death, and pissed about losing out on the drug deal. As fate would have it, he forces Sheriff Olson to hunt down Brian or lose his life, unaware who Sammy’s true killer is.
But wait, that’s not all.
Through a haze of memory and head trauma, Brian makes his way to the house of Howard and Christine (John Laughlin and Natassia Malthe), a couple with a contentious marriage, to say the least. He doesn’t know why he’s there, but he takes the couple hostage anyway. All the while, Rooker is out there leading a task force trying to figure out what the hell happened.
There’s a lot of plot in this movie. It isn’t handled in the most deft of manners, but none of it is boring. Woodward, for most of this production, delivers the most basic movie that his budget allows. Most of the creativity in this flick went into Ryan’s work, as evidenced by the simple photography, distracting in-scene graphics, noticeably poor editing, stilted acting (especially from Lundgren, who felt unrehearsed), silly action set pieces, and general disregard for quality. Hey, that’s what we like here, though.
Some nuts and bolts shittiness includes bad CGI. All muzzle flashes and bullet impacts in the movie are CGI. My personal favorite is when the CGI artists, instead of using sparks, created little puffs of dust when bullets hit stucco walls, but didn’t bother leaving behind any bullet holes. Another wonderful moment of shitty filmmaking is when a bad guy gets shot and does that little shimmy that bad guys do in movies when they get shot with a machine gun. Only, there were just three bullet impacts. It’s the little things like that — the missing attention to detail — that can make a shitty movie more enjoyable.
With this movie, though, it’s that story, and the first of the two twists at the end. Not a lot is telegraphed, so even viewers with hundreds of Hollywood thrillers in their rearview might not pick up on what’s going to happen in the final act.
There is so much about this movie that hurts watchability. Most of the movie is indistinguishable from any other throwaway flick that winds up in long residence on Tubi. But that screenplay keeps it from settling amongst all the other anonymous dreck in the Watchability Index. 4GOT10 makes it into the top half of the Index, displacing Bone Dry at #173.