Treats us like morons

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2004)

There was a lot of clever talk in the beginning, which was good, and they should have kept it that way. But before long the movie inevitably sold its soul to the usual Hollywood idols: guns and cars. What is it with movie producers and guns and cars? This could have been a great movie if it had kept up the tension in the talking rather than the usual childish blasting and crashing about. And funny how Tom Cruise's gun was made to sound so much louder than everyone else's...
If you start to think about this movie for just a few seconds the whole thing falls apart. Cruise just doesn't look like a guy who can scythe his way through a crowd of bouncers in a nightclub, nor did his character seem like a guy who would think that such a ridiculous thing is necessary in order to take someone out, but he does look like some edgy guy who can do a lot of talking, trying to rationalise what he's doing. More of that sort of thing would have helped paper over the incredible holes in the plot. Hey, don't even start thinking about the plot for a moment, absolutely none of it makes sense. Like how could Vincent with a single blow of an axe cut off the power in an entire office block, including the telephones? - and why did he have to do that anyway...? Nor did Vincent's inane philosophising about Darwin and I Ching - two diametrically opposed concepts - make sense. I can only suppose we weren't supposed to be intelligent enough to worry about that.
Well, Cruise and Foxx did good enough jobs. Unfortunately, everyone else in the movie were mind-numbing stereotypes. If I was Cruise, who seems to be taking care of his own career and the films he chooses, I would have darn well pointed out all these shortcomings to the writer and director. Are actors so wrapped up in their own roles that they don't know how good or bad the rest of the film is going to be...? Just wondering...
Anyway, in the end this movie proved to be just so much glossy movie packaging rather than something that would really engage us or thrill us intellectually. It just wasn't up to it. And finally, the ending was nothing. Like something we'd seen before in twenty other movies. You could sense how the producers picked up the first ending that came out of the box, wanting to finish up and go home having done their routine 9-5 - without the slightest inclination to give us something to think about, like an alternative, surprise, unorthodox ending, that really didn't waste Cruise's rather interesting character.
Watchable stuff, but a big disappointment for a movie that's being so highly rated on this website.