Fails on every level. Drive BY the theater. Do not stop.

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 2011)

A pathetically contrived and derivative pseudo-psychological film-gris that wanted to be noir but realized it couldn't, so it beat its audience over the head instead.
The violence was clumsily comical, the characters were unengaging and entirely deserving of their fate, the action was soporific, and whatever he is, Ryan Gosling is not all that. He was certainly incapable of the excruciatingly long dramatic pauses and beats that unsuccessfully attempted to convey empathy and the "unspoken longing" between him and Carey Mulligan. I could certainly see what it tried to do, which is it gets a 3 instead of a 1. But it failed on every level, left nothing to the imagination, and assumed its audience was utterly concrete.