Could have been much better - and shorter!

Rating: 1/10 (29 January 2012)

Okay. The storyline in this film is pretty good. The bad guys are good, the cars are nice, the ending is good...um that's about it. The main star kinda reminds me of some of the reviews of the later Matrix films comparing Keanu Reeves to a block of wood. Pretty similar is many ways. He's actually a bad-a$$ fighter and driver, but he is incapable of showing any expression. Okay, maybe there is a good reason for this, but a bit of background work showing this may have helped me put up with it a bit more.
If they had added in 15 minutes at the beginning of the film explaining some of the back-stories and cut out all of the pauses and unnecessary it would be a good film.
I swear, if they had cut out all the bits where there was massively long, unnecessary slow-motion scenes and the bits where the characters pause for a minute or so not doing anything the film would have just been an hour long instead of an hour and a half!!! That is the bit that ruined it for me. I went in with high expectations and just got fed up about a third of the way in. I'm sure lots of the reviews here say that it helps build tension etc - but for me it was just incredibly annoying!
The ingredients were there - good cast, good story, lots of good acting, but it was just tedious overall. Someone needs to release a seriously cut-down version - maybe with some of the deleted/extra scenes thrown in to make it an actual feature-length film. Then I may watch it again. Otherwise not. I feel I have totally wasted half an hour of my life spread out throughout this film.
I had such high expectation based on so many reviews and such a high rating from them! Makes me wonder if the studio employed a few people full-time to rate it and bring it up! Finished watching just annoyed at IMDb and this is the first review I've written in years and it usually gets it pretty right.