There are good things and bad things in The Doorman, a Die Hard retread that hands the Bruce Willis role to Ruby Rose, the onetime model and TV presenter who made her name in Orange Is the New Black and has played Batwoman with some aplomb in TV shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and, unsurprisingly, Batwoman.
She is one of the good things. The character she plays a bit less so. In a pre-credits sequence we see Rose’s Sergeant Ali trying and failing to protect an American diplomat and her daughter while on active duty in Romania. Both mother and daughter die in an armed ambush and Ali is traumatised as a result. This, the trauma she carries for the rest of the film, will return to haunt her, we know from seeing this all too often. And, in the film’s final sequence, in mirror plotting, she will resolve it and triumph over her enemy, her past and herself.
Arc established, we cut to present-day New York, where the now discharged Ali takes a job as a doorman in a swish hotel that’s been almost entirely emptied for renovation. It’s here that she’ll get into Bruce Willis mode when the building is invaded by a criminal gang keen to find some valuable artworks secreted thereabout.
Other good things include Aksel Hennie as Borz, Ali’s boss and the gang’s inside man. And Jean Reno as gang boss Victor Dubois, Reno doing despicable foreigner duty much as Alan Rickman did in Die Hard and rolling the words around in his mouth in much the same way.
Hennie you may not know but he’s always superb. Watch Headhunters – a fabulously gnarly and hugely stylish Norwegian crime drama from 2011 – if you want to see him at his best. As for Reno, god knows he makes enough films, three or even four some years, and though his choices aren’t always the best, he’s always good, usually better than the material he’s working with and he has enough charisma to plug a lot of logical inconsistencies.
Logical inconsistency isn’t really the problem here, it’s familiarity. We have seen all this before. And yet Rose’s badassery is impressive. Handling weapons, engaging in mano a mano fights and jumping into air ducts, she looks like she can do it (the occasional glimpse of a stand-in to one side). She can do John Wick stance too, the one the understated badass adopts after wiping out a roomful of people, which Rose does once in a sequence where the film momentarily entirely abandons reason for the sake of a good fight.
Ungainly plotting also does this film no favours. It turns out that Ali’s dead sister’s husband and his two motherless children are in the building, and rather than just junk this entire strand, The Doorman keeps it in to add non-Die Hard shading to the whole thing. As the kids, Julian Feder and Kíla Lord Cassidy squeak through largely unscathed. But as their dad, Rupert Evans is left high and dry by a screenplay that introduces some vaguely half-assed romantic sub-plot that is the film’s ultimate no-no.
Still, the action’s good, eh? Yes, not bad. Director Ryûhei Kitamura keeps the pot bubbling, the motion going forward. It’s the reason to watch. And there is a sense that towards the end that some effort is being made to ring the changes. A fight with rolled up Old Masters in metal tubes is a novelty. Plus a death by hand grenade that is so audaciously mad that it will probably make you laugh. Good things and bad things.
The Doorman – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
