Dolph Lundgren is a Shitty Movie Sundays All-Star. Hardly a year has gone by since the 1980s when he hasn’t starred or featured prominently in multiple b-action or sci-fi flicks. His most notable hiatus was 2020, when he was busy battling terminal cancer that was first diagnosed in 2015. The man is a worker, and the shitty movie fan’s experience is better for it. Oh, by the way, he’s cancer free as of 2023.
Larceny, a joint Mexican-American production from 2017, fits right into this difficult era in his oeuvre. He looks aged, is definitely slow, and has a hard time carrying an action scene. We at Missile Test were unaware of his health issues, attributing the decline in his athleticism to mere aging. Well, let us eat some crow. Any shit we’ve given him for mailing it in for the last nine years is unjustified. Anyway…
Dolph plays Jack, a professional thief who contracts with three-letter agencies of the US government to mess with drug cartels. His latest target is Capitan (Luis Gatica). Jack and his heist team — sexy Norma, tough and unstable Tank, and enthusiastic tech whiz Billy (Jocelyn Osorio, Isaac C. Singleton Jr., and Fabián López) — steal a zip drive from Capitan’s accountant that will lead them to the location of twenty million bucks. Unfortunately, the cash is stored in the armory of Mexico’s most notorious prison. Unfortunate, because as soon as the cast enters the prison, the film becomes, for the most part, a one-location shoot.
Director R. Ellis Frazier, who also produced, seemed to know the limitations of the budget. That’s about it, though. Larceny is bare bones.
For example, a maximum security Mexican prison will likely be filled with many guards and prisoners. Well, hiring that many extras is bad for the budget. So, to keep these appearances to a minimum, Frazier has Jack and his crew fill the prison with knockout gas, leaving his four principals to run around the bare grey walls of the prison for 
an entire act all on their own. It’s like everyone disappeared in a wisp of smoke, to reappear in the final act when Dolph and company need some extra muscle to take out some bad guys.
What starts as a heist movie becomes a prison siege. That’s fine, but it requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief to believe this set is a working prison. Well, at least they all got to film in Baja for a few weeks.
There are typical twists and turns, a double-cross or two, and then the situation resolves itself with rapidity. The production must have needed to wrap up. Indeed, the film sets up a final confrontation with Capitan’s second group of elite killers, after the first group of elite killers was disposed of, only to have this last threat taken care of offscreen. Having no budget is hardly a sin at Shitty Movie Sundays, nor do we judge a film for cutting too many corners. But, this. Frazier and screenwriter Benjamin Budd had a more expansive story in mind, and little effort was put into hiding that fact from the audience. The result are action scenes, in an action movie, that the audience is forced to infer, rather than witness. And who wouldn’t want to see some more slow kicks and somnambulistic windmill punches from Dolph?
Dolph Lundgren has been in some tough watches throughout his career, and Larceny is one of the toughest. He had trouble carrying the movie, and no one else was in a position to step up. Compare that with Castle Falls, where Dolph was given a much needed boost from a costar. Maybe a dynamic cast member would have improved this flick’s watchability, or maybe not. The film we viewers got is a stinker, landing in the bottom half of the Watchability Index, displacing 2307: Winter’s Dream at #433. This one is for the Dolph completists.