Extremely disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (20 March 2012)

I hated this movie, mostly because it could have been so much more interesting than it was. It was very stylized (a la Tarantino), which is memorable in its way, but ultimately there was so little "there" there. I thought Ryan Gosling's performance was a real tour de force - you never doubted that his character was all the many, many things that he revealed himself to be. But the intriguing relationships, between Driver and Irene, and especially between Shannon and Driver, and even between Shannon and Bernie, were introduced and then abandoned for a trite gangster plot that's been done about a thousand times before, though (minor spoiler alert) the shot of the 2 men's shadows at the end was almost worth sitting through the gruesome endless violence - this movie had more corpses littered about the stage than a Shakespearean tragedy. I was enthralled during the first half of the movie, but just irritated by the second half, and so disappointed. Is that all the filmmaker wanted to say?