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Frank Grillo and Joe Carnahan's War Party aims to reinvent entertainment

It's not just gun shots and punches; the key to War Party films is heartfelt persuasion. Again, little films with big hearts..and muscles. Show some self-respect and start paying attention, ladies and gentlemen
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Action thrillers are vastly underrated. Films involving the highest order of entertainment don't get the respect they deserve in today's cinema landscape, where you either have to pose for an Oscar, gleam for the kids crowd, or risk being shoved aside.

Frank Grillo and Joe Carnahan want to change that mindset, and give the entertainment industry a new coat of old school paint with their production company, War Party. Imagine walking into a movie theater and not getting preached or talked down to, yet being enthralled instead. The film snobs may not approve, but the escapism crowd will love it.

Now, I'm not talking about a Henley wearing Arnold raging through town looking for his daughter in Commando. Grillo and Carnahan want to do something more sophisticated than that, yet still pack the same level of punch that the 1980's pleasure did.

Look at their launch pad project, the October Netflix Original film, Wheelman. Written and directed with a ruthless nod to the 1970's yet carrying a ruggedly honest and fresh point of view, this wasn't your normal getaway driver gets betrayed and guns for revenge flick. Grillo's driver didn't leave the vehicle for the first hour of the film and the camera stayed in the car with him. It was intimate danger mixed with gritty and authentic writing. It reminded you of something you may have caught when you were a kid, but there was something different, unique, and provocative about its execution.

This isn't the first time Grillo and Carnahan have taken a familiar genre piece and smacked the familiarity out of it. The actor and writer/director teamed up on the underrated 2012 stranded in the wilderness drama, The Grey. Painted as a simplistic "Liam Neeson fights a wolf" sensation in the trailer, the thriller was really about the desolation of man when everything is stripped away in the brutally cold outdoors. Grillo played an ex-con turned oil rig worker who had a rusty knife's edge to his attitude, but his character ended up in a different spot than he began. It was the first true glimpse of what the actor could do, and reminded audiences how daring of a storyteller Carnahan is.

Here, you have two guys who don't play by Hollywood's rules. If they don't believe in it, they don't do it. Carnahan was once attached to direct Mission Impossible 3, but left due to creative differences. His scene that kicks off the film still stands as one of the best in the franchise. Carnahan and Grillo were loosely attached to helm a Death Wish remake, but then Hollywood wanted to gloss it up and requested burned out action star Bruce Willis to get involved. Carnahan left the project as a director, yet you can still appreciate his script in this weekend's Eli Roth version.

Grillo may be the busiest actor in the land of make-believe, but he didn't get there easily. It took years of hard work, keeping his head down, and squeezing the juice out of any role he encountered. He's an actor who can make a small role seem bigger than the movie star on the poster. His scenes with Neeson in The Grey as well as work in the Avengers series, End of Watch, and Warrior embody that notion. Now, Grillo is a bona fide movie star. He carried The Purge franchise for two highly successful sequels, anchored DirecTV's MMA series, Kingdom, and has a bevy of action delights coming out, including Donnybrook, Reprisal, and Into the Ashes in the next year.

Good friends in real life who treat a boxing gym like a bar in their free time, Grillo and Carnahan fired up War Party in order to make the movies a better place to be. It's not just about producing elite action films. It's not just there to keep them busy. These two guys have a vision and are seeing it through with the force of a hard stiff jab to the skull of theaters everywhere.

The most sad thing in life is someone doing something just to move or fill the time in Hollywood. Here's a script, find a director, gather some stars, and let's produce a flimsy and boring piece of entertainment. Who needs that in their life when prices are up over ten dollars per person for a ticket? Grillo and Carnahan are shooting to thrill, and Wheelman was just a taste test.

In a September Variety article, Carnahan said the goal is to produce "high-quality, well executed action thrillers with an essential emotional core" with War Party films. If you look at what Wheelman promised and provided viewers with, the goal is being reached. It was a high-quality and well executed action thriller with a father-daughter dynamic as its emotional core.

War Party has teamed up with an investment group in Calgary to establish the WarChest fund, which will help produce "3-5 films a year". Each film will cost $20 million or less, or the amount of pay it takes Bruce Willis to show to a set and work. These are low-budget gems with big time dreams.

Grillo and Carnahan's next War Party project is already wrapped, the action thriller, El Chicano, which is written by Carnahan and directed by Benjamin Bray. A tale of two brothers surviving on the dangerous streets of East L.A., the film hopes to target the global market, including the Hispanic community. These guys want to make little films with big hearts.

Shooting on Carnahan's next directorial effort, Boss Level, has commenced in Atlanta with Grillo and Mel Gibson set to star in a story that combines Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow flavors with a special forces officer stuck in a loop fighting for his life. Yeah, the bad boy of cinema teaming up with the most authentic man of action in movies will be something special. After that, the two will team up on a remake of The Raid.

When I think about great action thrillers, I think about being enlivened by visual spectacle and touched by something personal. The high stakes driving thrills in Rush's Wheelman never outran the emotional bond that was ignited early and built up slowly between Grillo's driver and his daughter (Caitlin Carmichael). Without that, the film isn't as effective.

It's not just gun shots and punches; the key to War Party films is heartfelt persuasion. Again, little films with big hearts..and muscles. Show some self-respect and start paying attention, ladies and gentlemen.

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