Entertaining but ultimately a let down and very thin.

Rating: 6/10 (12 November 2006)

This is my kind of genre and I love Owen and many of the other actors in this movie, so to watch them read poor dialogue like this and act un-actable scenes was painful. It's really that distracting.
Fortunately a bleak and interesting future makes for some face saving action scenes that are very tense. It must be warned however what passes for the future here is a mishmash of current affairs issues taken to the extreme. There is no insight, no real imagination here either, it's all as if they grabbed someone of the street and asked them what they thought the future would be like.
If you can get past the hammy acting, dialogue and concentrate on the more interesting scary aspects of this future world, I'd like to say you'll find a great story. But you won't. I don't ask for messages in my films, but there was no insight into anything here. Not the characters, not the idea behind it, no story metaphor (although plenty of heavy handed visual metaphor).
As for a thinking persons action movie, sort of an insult to thinking people really. I know a lot of popcorn movie goers who'd be just as happy to see this, though it is a fair bit more interesting than your average Saturday night flick.
To sum up, it should have been a thinking persons movie, and if the dialogue was better it would help. Even so, the story is so flawed, it's like you know something good is there but, it's been in such a horrendous car wreck you barely make it out. What a real pity, but thank god for the cinematographer!