Watch Anthony Mackie and Frank Grillo in clip from Netflix's action-thriller Point Blank
In the Netflix action-thriller Point Blank (out Friday), Anthony Mackie plays an emergency room nurse named Paul who is forced to help Frank Grillo‘s badly injured criminal Abe to save the life of Paul’s wife (Teyonah Parris) and their unborn child. That’s right, it’s a Marvel Cinematic Universe reunion as the Falcon reluctantly teams with Crossbones in this latest movie from Everly and Mayhem director Joe Lynch.
“Frank and Anthony, who were buddies since Captain America: Winter Soldier, they had always wanted to do another movie together that didn’t have wings, and Marvel superpowers, and many storylines,” says Lynch about the film, a remake of a 2010 French crime drama (and not the Lee Marvin-starring 1968 thriller).
While Lynch’s filmography boasts plenty of action, it has been rather short on car chases. The director made up for lost time on the set of Point Blank, which found Mackie and Grillo hurtling around the streets of Cincinnati in a variety of vehicles, including a PT Cruiser.
“I’ve wanted to do car chase scenes since I was a little kid,” says Lynch. “I grew up in a garage. My dad customized cars. He was one of the few guys in New York who could figure out how to customize a PT Cruiser. I was like, It would be so cool to do a car chase scene with a PT Cruiser — not because it’s a cool car, it’s just different. That idea of subverting the normal action tropes was really exciting.”
In the film, Paul and Abe are pursued by a pair of cops, played by Boris McGiver from House of Cards and Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden.
“It was a dream come true,” Lynch says of working with Harden. “I was such a fan of hers, way back to Miller’s Crossing, but also everything from Pollock to The Mist. She’s so versatile. Look, any chance you get to have an Academy Award winner on your set, you take that chance.”
Not that Harden is the kind of actor who stays back at the hotel, polishing her Oscar, as Lynch found out when one evening he screened Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King’s berserkly entertaining adaptation of his tale about killer trucks.
“She loved just hanging out with us and being part of the family,” says the filmmaker. “We were doing movie nights every weekend, and she caught wind of this and was like, ‘I want to hang out! Next thing you know, we’re at this bar in Cincinnati, watching Maximum Overdrive. And, if you can imagine, Marcia Gay Harden [is] doing quotes from Maximum Overdrive! That’s what movie-making is all about sometimes.”
Watch an exclusive clip from Point Blank, above.
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