Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

behalf of his wife who is still the principle shareholder, but he’s none too happy with the troublesome Donovan who has come aboard and is a making a ruckus. Those of us who watched the first movie know full well that Brandon will take things to next level if he feels threatened enough, so Donovan might want to watch his ass. But before it reaches that level of seriousness Brandon tries to convince his lovely assistant Nina (Sharon Leal – sophisticated hotness) to go above and beyond the call of duty to get some dirt on Donovan, but she’s obviously not a team player. Brandon also has the Detective we met earlier in the day in his hip pocket, a detective who managed to suppress some critical information about the Emery Sims case that might have set Emery free. What started out as Donovan just wanting to secure some investment capitol has turned into something much greater as he has set about trying to clear the family name. But we know that Brandon has killed before and will not hesitate to kill again to preserve all that he’s worked so hard to steal. Watch yourself now.

‘Motives 2: Retribution’ is technically superior in every conceivable way to the original ‘Motives’ but it doesn’t have that first films electric spark and overall sordidness that made watching the original so unexpectedly entertaining. This is surprising because ‘Motives 2’ has a fantastic cast of solid actors driving the narrative forward. We’ve been wondering on this rarely read site for years why Sean Blakemore and William Johnson aren’t top-line stars by now since both of these dudes seem to have skills, screen presence and looks (so I’m told) to be big time movie stars. Brian J. White and Vivica Fox are already movie stars and Sharon Leal is on the verge of being one. But where the first movie had a convoluted plot that spread largely along three characters, this one had a convoluted plot that spread across seven or eight characters and that was just way too many characters for this story to support the way that it was written. Because of this the movie had to sacrifice action and exploitation for exposition in order to service the large number of characters it had to support, and with the number beautiful women that Rainforest Films had the foresight to cast in this movie, losing opportunities to exploit them is not a good thing. Not that we encourage that of course. Even with this being the case there are still large plot holes and confusion in the narrative despite the attempts of the filmmakers to fill these holes with long stretches of dialog. Personally I would have just showed Sharon Leal running around in her underwear some more to cover these plot holes, not that we support that kind of thing of course.