The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

There’s plenty of action, but little excitement in the latest Bruce Willis-starring thriller, Precious Cargo, whose seemingly unoriginal and cliché-heavy plot offers almost nothing to take it above being just another thoughtless and unmemorable actioner.

The film opens with Karen (Meet Joe Black’s Forlani); a two-faced thief attempting to pull off a multi-million dollar caper for unforgiving crime-boss, Eddie (the painfully passive Willis). Of course, it all soon goes wrong and Karen is forced to go on the run with Eddie promising to kill her if she doesn’t come up with the full amount of the heist.

With nowhere else to go and with Eddie’s men hot on her tail, Karen decides to turn up at the doorstep of ex-boyfriend Jack (Gosselaar, of Saved by the Bell fame); a fellow criminal referred to as the ‘Michelangelo of Thieves’. Claiming that she is pregnant with his child, she asks him for help in pulling off ‘one last job’ together involving a truck full of diamonds. Reluctantly, Jack agrees to the heist and sets out to collect a multi-million-dollar prize which, of course, Eddie and his men also want to get a piece of.

Despite getting top billing, Willis only makes relatively scattered and brief appearances throughout the film, turning in another dispassionate performance as a supposedly evil criminal kingpin with a short fuse.  Aside from one decently shot action-sequence involving a jet-ski, there’s nothing remotely interesting or thrilling about the script and the plot racks up a bigger body-count than it builds any kind of real tension or excitement. The dialogue is atrocious and the film seems almost unapologetically unimaginative as it embraces every possible heist-thriller trope in the book, while the chemistry between the leads, especially Gosselaar and Forlani, is pretty much non-existent.

Unless you are a super hard-core Bruce Willis fan, there's little to gain from Precious Cargo – a piece that serves no more purpose than to be an excercise in how not to make a film. As for Willis, well the less said the better for this once reliable action lead.