Centering a whole movie on Taraji P. Henson as an assassin should be one of those guaranteed recipes for success like letting Taika Waititi make a wacky science-fiction comedy about the long-term effects of colonialism or letting Katherine Hepburn act in any movie ever. Tragically, Proud Mary totally squanders the idea of Taraji P. Henson as an action hero by refusing to give either Henson or the audience anything fun to do. The fact that the plot finds bizarrely little time for shoot-out's and other staples of action movie cinema is a key example of how Proud Mary fails to live up to it's potential, though it's far from the only way this motion picture manages to come up short, not by a long shot.
