‘Hostile Takeover’ (2025) Review – Is Michael Jai White Finally Showing His Age?
You hire Michael Jai White to throw a mean side kick, look cool, and probably take his shirt off at some point, and on this most essential level, Michael Hamilton-Wright’s Hostile Takeover ticks all the boxes. But it’s also one of the first movies starring White that really reminded me he’s 57 years of age. He might not be showing any decline in his physique, but he can’t move the way he used to, and this action-comedy’s efforts to obscure that fact leave a little to be desired.
It’s obvious from the self-aware narration and the silly, video-game-esque interstitials that introduce key characters that this is a movie with its tongue firmly in its cheek. Even the premise is wacky. White plays Pete, an ageing hitman whose decision to start attending Workaholics Anonymous meetings leads his ruthless employer, Matteo Arcado (John Littlefield), to mistakenly assume he’s a snitch. The low-stakes misunderstanding plot has little dramatic urgency. It’s just an excuse to set Pete against a menagerie of stereotypical assassins who’re trying to cash in on his new bounty.
But Hostile Takeover doesn’t lean into its humour enough to qualify as a fully-fledged comedy. There are some funny-ish practical gore moments and recurring gags about Pete inadvertently mimicking people’s accents and not attending social events with other assassins, but it’s not an out-and-out comedy in the way that White’s Blaxploitation pastiche – and still the best thing he’s ever done – Black Dynamite is. This can sometimes let the audience’s attention linger too long on the underdeveloped plot and characters, and the half-baked romance at the story’s core, where Pete is trying to achieve a better work-life balance so that he can start a relationship with Mora (Aimee Stolte), the daughter of his boss.
When it’s not trying to be funny it’s trying to be an action flick, containing a bunch of the obligatory fight sequences that are expected of a Michael Jai White vehicle. Here, you can feel the strain. The choreography is deliberately slow to allow White to perform it himself, and while his technique remains impeccable, you can tell you’re looking at a man touching 60. It’s admirable that someone of that age is still capable of doing his own stunts at all, and I’d rather this than a Liam-Neeson-in-Taken 3 level of editing obscurantism, but I noticed it, is all I’m saying.
In many ways the movie is structured to guarantee you notice it. Pete visits each of Acardo’s pet assassins in turn to try and clear things up, and each time the sequence devolves into an exchange of jokes and then a fight. When I said these guys were generic, I really meant it, too. There’s a Russian named Reaper (Aleks Paunovic, Snowpiercer) whose only defining characteristic is being Russian (and being into dodgeball). Nobody else fares any better. Each hitman has a personal grievance – usually involving Pete having missed some kind of personal appointment with them – and at best one personal quirk. There’s Mingjue (Alex Mallari Jr., Code 8: Part II), Thanatos (Damon Runyan), and Gabriel (Kyle Bailey), and I couldn’t tell you a single thing about any of them.
The only meaningful antagonism comes from Angel Gratis (Dawn Olivieri, Yellowstone), who only shows up five minutes before the end. What’s supposed to pull us through instead is whether Pete will manage to organise his life in such a way that he isn’t so beholden to his murder-for-hire career. It isn’t the most engaging premise under the best of circumstances, but given that he’s visibly getting on in years, it might be appropriate that he’s trying to tone it down a little.