The Workout (2025) Review
Director: James Cullen Bressack
Cast: Peter Jae, Josh Kelly, Ashlee Evans-Smith, Galadriel Stineman, Augie Duke, David Joshua Lawrence
Running time: 84 mins
Co-written and directed by James Cullen Bressack, this low-budget revenge thriller has an intriguing degree of ambition and pulls off both some decent fight sequences and some unexpectedly impressive gore moments. However, its reach ultimately exceeds its grasp, as none of its elaborately set up ideas have any kind of pay-off.
The film opens with happily married former soldier Wyatt Park (Peter Jae) and his pregnant wife Becca (Galadriel Stineman) shooting a promotional video in their new gym, with Wyatt’s best friend and gym co-owner Levi (Josh Kelly), who’s also Becca’s brother. However, when mobsters burst in wielding guns, a tragic accident leaves Becca dead and Wyatt with a debilitating brain condition that means he’s going to gradually lose both his memory and all cognitive function.
Consumed with vengeance and desperate to enact his bloody payback before he loses his memory forever, Wyatt persuades Levi to help him hunt down those responsible. Along the way, they get help from local cop O’Brien (co-writer David Joshua Lawrence), tech expert Glitch (Bressack, in a blurred-out cameo) and former platoon buddy Tank (Ashlee Evans-Smith).
The film’s central gimmick is that it’s nominally in documentary format, with Levi and Wyatt both wearing body cameras at all times, and Glitch hooking them up with what he calls a “God’s eye device” that can pull footage from any other cameras in the area. The script jumps through two different hoops to explain this complicated set-up – first, the doctor advises documenting everything to aid with Wyatt’s future memory loss, and second, Wyatt decides that his baby daughter Becca (who was saved after her mother died) will need a video record of what really happened when she’s older, because, fairly understandably, he’s about to go on a murderous rampage and people might say bad things about him.
In fairness, the central gimmick pays off during the impressively staged fight sequences, because the body-cam angles make those scenes feel fresh and original, although they’re diminished slightly by being cut together with shots from the other cameras. However, there’s no narrative pay-off to the idea, and the only other time they even really come into play is when Wyatt and Levi take down the security team at a strip club and the body-cameras end up with some gratuitous close-ups of topless dancers.
The other problem is that the film’s conceit is inconsistent, as there are multiple shots that clearly didn’t come from any hidden cameras or CCTV footage or whatever, such as an angle from behind a wheel during a car chase, for example, or some body-cam footage from a fight with Tank, despite the fact that she’s not wearing a camera. Arguably, the conceit itself backfires, because you end up analysing each shot and wondering which camera it came from.
In addition, the script tries to do too much – it isn’t really necessary to have both the memory condition AND the record for Becca as an excuse for the doc format, for example, and the dialogue fails to generate any emotion from either of those ideas. On top of that, there’s a twist in the story that is so blatantly telegraphed that the eventual reveal completely lacks impact.
The final problem is the performances, which are at best passable and at worst amateurish. Jae, in particular, really overdoes his angry outburst scenes, even if he is supposed to have a brain condition, while everyone else just seems like they are friends of the director, roped in to play parts.
On the plus side, the violence is much more extreme than you might be expecting from this sort of thing, and there are three key gore moments in particular that are impressively nasty. Indeed, one of them gives the film its best moment, the only time the film delivers genuine shock and a dash of emotion.
In short, this is worth seeing for its inventively shot fight sequences and its visceral deployment of the red stuff, but it’s hampered by the script, the performances and a failure to capitalise on its painstakingly set up central gimmick. It deserves points for ambition though.
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