Did Frank Grillo gamble away his dignity on a late-night poker game, or did someone slip a “Bangladeshi Bond” clause into his contract between sips of cheap tequila? This is the idle question that haunts you after enduring MR-9: Do or Die, a cross-cultural concoction that plays less like a spy thriller and more like a xenophobic prank from the gods of genre schlock. Asif Akbar, the architect behind this mad cross-continental experiment (U.S. and Bangladesh mucking about like oil and water in a leaky martini shaker), seems to have mistaken trash for treasure and—amazingly—isn’t alone in that delusion.
Enter ABM Sumon as Masud Rana—imposing as the Bangladeshi James Bond in the same way a knockoff purse is imposing strung over your shoulder at a flea market in the heat of July. Suave? Only if your idea of charm is a vacant stare and the stiff emotional cadence of a GPS navigation system. This film isn’t just derivative; it’s possessed by the fever dream of every forgotten '90s Chuck Norris VHS, only with less conviction.
Now, Frank Grillo and Michael Jai White. You’d be forgiven for thinking these two wandered onto set after realizing their Uber app glitched, and instead of escaping, someone forced them at Nerf-blaster-point to collect their paychecks in exchange for pretending to punch cardboard. Both sport expressions ranging from “mildly inconvenienced” to “catatonic regret”—faces rarely seen on action heroes, but all-too-familiar to parents forced to attend middle school Christmas pageants.
And then, God bless, Jessia Islam and Sakshi Pradhan: two women adrift on a sea of narrative nonsense. They perform with the energy of people who know they're being filmed but hope, deep down, that the footage will be lost in a technical mishap. Watching these characters try to out-quip or out-kick the villains is less spy fi and more sidelong slapstick. The fight choreography—if you can call it that—evokes a desperate ballet of tranquilized elk making their way across an ice rink. Forget spectacle; we’re left with spectacle's awkward, limping cousin.
Themes? The movie offers betrayal, espionage, and revenge smeared across the screen like a child’s attempt at finger-painting. There’s no tension—just an endless loop of “look over here, something important is about to happen!” which, spoiler alert, never does. The one-liners are so withered and forced they could file for workers’ comp, and the melodrama approaches the sublime—only in its pulverizing monotony.
Then, the effects. Oh, the effects! If the first “Mission: Impossible” was a Rolex, this is the equivalent of a Happy Meal toy that breaks while you’re opening the ketchup. Digital backgrounds glow with the cloudy radiance of a deleted first draft. The gadgets—oh, the gadgets!—spring forth like afterthoughts from the world’s worst episode of QVC. Who greenlit a robotic fly with lasers? Was this a subplot borrowed from a rejected episode of “Inspector Gadget,” or simply the fevered wish of someone whose last tech innovation was the Slap Chop?
There’s a kind of baleful beauty to the way MR-9: Do or Die stumbles from scene to scene, as if assembled by committee from YouTube tutorials and hazy childhood recollections of what a “cool” spy movie must look like. The CGI is less special than especially embarrassing; the plot’s ambition, meanwhile, is stunted by the weight of self-parody and hubris. It isn’t nostalgia—it’s temporal vertigo, a confusion of eras that leaves you longing for the golden age of Windows XP.
Yet, in its own inscrutable, nightmarish way, MR-9 will linger with you. Not because it’s good—on the contrary, it hurls itself into the pits of cinematic despair so gleefully you have to tip your hat. There are bad movies and there are “trash” movies, and then there’s MR-9: Do or Die. Watching it is an exercise in masochism—an initiation rite for the true lovers of disaster. If you want your standards to plummet into the Mariana Trench, if you long for the kind of incompetence that circles all the way back to accidental entertainment, this is your ticket.
MR-9: Do or Die isn’t just a film. It’s a warning and a dare—proof that the only thing harder to kill than a secret agent is the hope that, somewhere, someone will make a worse movie… and that you'll gleefully watch it, just to see if it’s possible.
