Making a so-bad-it’s-good action movie isn’t rocket science. For starters, you have to find a screenplay that’s simple but intelligible, and most importantly, that leans into the bombast with humor and levity. After that, getting a director who knows how to helm fight and shootout sequences is a must. Then, you need to cast a star who exhibits a number of innate qualities, such as muscles and machismo. Finally, in order to really hearken back to the genre’s heyday (the 1980s-90s), you might want to toss in some gratuitous stuff, even if that’s fallen out of fashion. In my experience, if you add at least three of those four things to your flick, then you’re golden. Alternatively, you could just do what The Bricklayer did and feature none of those elements and hope for the best. As action-filmmaking legend James Cameron once said, “hope is a strategy.” Wait, did I get that right?

In The Bricklayer, Aaron Eckhart plays Steve Vail, a former CIA badass turned – you guessed it – a bricklayer. When a thought-to-be-dead colleague of his, Victor Radek (Clifton Collins Jr.), resurfaces in Greece and starts assassinating journalists in a plot to incriminate the CIA, Vail is recruited by his old boss to eliminate the threat and save the agency. Now I know what you might be thinking: this sounds like the simple but intelligible story that I mentioned in my opening. To that I’d respond: yes, it’s certainly simple. Right off the bat, Vail is partnered with Kate Bannon (Nina Dobrev), an inexperienced CIA analyst who also happens to look stunning in stiletto heels. Is she in any way qualified to be in the field, chasing a deadly assassin who threatens to destroy America’s intelligence apparatus? Definitely not, but then again, an incompetent partner for an absolute tank like Vail feels like an idea plucked straight from action movies of yore. After all, a character like Kate could create opportunities for a few jokes, and if brave enough to be antiquated, some romance. At this point in the film, all I could see is potential; simple potential, but potential.

Of course, potential is easily squandered when making a movie, especially if the acting and direction miss the mark. And let me tell you, they both really miss the mark in The Bricklayer. On the acting side, both Eckhart and Dobrev are unconvincing, unlikable, and frankly, pretty horrendous. After spending the last decade trying to make himself an action star, Eckhart has apparently learned nothing. Sure, he’s got the chin and the muscles, but he lacks the inherent grit and gumption required to pass as an action hero. As for charisma, there are flickers of it when he’s being arrogant, but when he’s being honorable, it completely disappears. Then there’s Dobrev as Kate, a character whose job is essentially to carry water for Vail. I think there are moments in the script where she’s meant to be funny, and I know there are moments where she’s meant to be sympathetic, but she ends up being neither. I hate to be mean, but, her character kind of sucks. Then again, so does Vail, to the extent that I found myself rooting for Radek before all was said and done. To be fair, I know from past projects that both Eckhart and Dobrev are good actors, so I’m going to assign most of the blame to the director.

Remember when Renny Harlin cooked? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched Cliffhanger, Die Hard 2, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Sadly, that was a very long time ago. Even so, whenever my halfwit brain reads the words “directed by Renny Harlin”, it still foolishly reckons maybe he’s got one more in him. Well, if he does, The Bricklayer ain’t it. As the guy who directed those aforementioned gems, I cannot for the life of me figure out why he thought that seriousness was the way to go with this one. On set, Harlin should’ve been calling Eckhart over every scene and reminding him that he’s in a B-movie called The Bricklayer, so there’s no need to mimic Jason Bourne or John Wick. He should’ve been instructing Dobrev to embrace her character’s uselessness and make it a humorous strength. By failing to do so, or by preventing his cast from taking the initiative to do so, he kneecapped this film. At least there’s a lot of gunplay and hand-to-hand fights in The Bricklayer, right? I mean, if there’s anything that Harlin should do well, it’s framing up some bloody violence. Alas, as with everything else, he messes this up too. The shootouts are undermined by VFX gunshots and blood, and the fisticuffs falter due to some of the shoddiest coordination I’ve witnessed in quite some time. Even the explosions, one of the easier things to get right, are utter garbage.

All things being considered, there was one last thing that could’ve made The Bricklayer at least moderately watchable: a coherent screenplay with exciting twists. As I said, this story is simple, which it should be. However, somehow, it’s simultaneously impossible to follow. Important things happen with the least possible effort put into their build-up. Crucial bits of dialogue are mumbled underneath a terrible score. And the few twists that come along are undone by the inevitable apathy amassed beforehand. When you combine this form of storytelling with abysmal acting, dismal direction, and a complete dearth of sex appeal, you’re left with a movie that feels more like a college student’s short film than anything else. In the end, The Bricklayer failed because it didn’t follow the “How to Craft an Action B-movie” guidebook. And you know what’s the crazy thing? Renny Harlin was one of its authors.

If I had to score it, I’d give The Bricklayer a 2/10.