It’s a long Segway ride from Paul Blart, Mall Cop to the deadly ex-cop Kevin James plays in the new film “Guns Up.” In it, he’s left his police career to be an enforcer for a local Irish gang in order to raise money to buy a diner with his ever-chipper wife Lucy.
He doesn’t share information about his dangerous gig with his family, but he’s occasionally called away from family dinner night to deal with situations that usually involve a lot of gunfire and dead bodies. James is well suited for his character physically, in his large build and new beard, becoming a menacing enforcer that’s such a change from the overgrown baby role he perfected in “Blart” or on TV’s “King of Queens.”
Still, the Australian writer and director Edward Drake, who directed some of the final movies of Bruce Willis, intends at least some of “Guns Up” to be a comedy, using the odd wisecrack or rolling of eyes to indicate it.
For all its modest goals, the film is pretty well cast, with the always welcome Christina Ricci as his wife, and a group of mobsters led by Melissa Leo, and featuring Luis Guzmán and Joey Diaz, a familiar face from a number of mob movies including the “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark.”
There’s an underlying “Sopranos” feel, too, from the gritty Jersey setting to the idea of a father who talks college plans with his daughter when he’s not called away to settle mayhem.
This is an Irish outfit, though, with Leo heading it up and Francis Cronin doing a good job as a lieutenant who gets to provide more comic relief than the lead. As a villain, Timothy V. Murphy (of “Sons of Anarchy” and “Criminal Minds”) plays it a little heavy handed, or maybe he’s just written one-dimensionally.
For a film shot in 18 days, “Guns Up” has a professional look and a whole lot of authentic looking firepower. There are long scenes of gang battles where cops never show up no matter how loud it gets.
The efforts of James’ character to get out of the game is a familiar one in mob yarns, and things change up somewhat in a mid-film twist that is more than a little contrived. It’s all in the effort to get out the message that anything one does in an effort to protect the family can’t be wrong — an aphorism clumsily inserted more than once the gunfire dies down.
Though it might have intended to be the kind of action film the whole family can enjoy, it eventually turns to throat-cutting, machine guns and coarse language.
When the youngest child is witness to mayhem, he asks, “Is dad John Wick?” though James doesn’t quite achieve that and the film certainly doesn’t.