Some would dignify boys' own 90-mile-an-hour slaughterfests like this as homages to John Woo and bandy about adjectives like 'balletic' (without personally having any regard for actual ballet, of course). This is plainly foolish: it does however do exactly what it says on the tin, and far more gratifyingly and honestly than the likes of Live Free or Die Hard, which made the fatal twin errors of bothering to pretend it had a plot while being too insecure to revel in its preposterous stupidity.Clive Owen plays a good man with a gun, basically Dwight from Sin City again. Monica Bellucci is a tart with a heart. Paul Giamatti is a bad man with a gun. All three get a bagful of droll graveyard-humour lines to dip into during the very brief respites in the shooting, and Giamatti's tend to be the best since irredeemable villains always get to have the most fun. It's all so cheerfully tasteless it's impossible to feel insulted. Something to tide one over until Crank: High Voltage comes out, anyway.
5/10
1 comment:
As I'm sure you no doubt have guessed, I enjoyed this a great deal when I went to see it last year. Whatever you think of it, you can't accuse it of being pretentious.
The fighty men made the guns go bang[1]. Two thumbs up.
[1] Film criticism in the style of Dan Brown.
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