Well-executed (ha ha) and fun to watch but cliché-laden

Rating: 7/10 (25 February 2015)

I really struggled to choose a rating for this movie. Lots of good, lots of bad.
Good:

Keanu does a great job. Just the right mix of believable and unbelievable.

Really excellent directing and cinematography. It's really easy in these kinds of films for the action scenes to be hard to follow, but these are great. No surprise this crew were associated with The Matrix, whose action scenes were similarly clean.

A few nice little surprises, but not enough of them.

Bad (spoilers here):

Oh lord, the clichés. First, the entire premise: badass hit-man forced out of retirement to avenge a wrong done to him. Russian mob boss with brash dumbass son. Obligatory stash of weapons and money sealed under concrete floor. Old friend who appears to have turned on our hero but saves his bacon at a couple of crucial moments. Climactic fight with the main bad guy in which they toss aside their guns and fight hand to hand.

That wrong done to him? Killing his dog and stealing his car. Seriously? I get the sentiment behind the dog and his dead wife and all, but still I was reminded of the bit in Last Action Hero about how they killed his favorite second cousin or whatever.

If this was the first movie you'd ever seen in this genre, it would be totally amazing. As it is, I kept seeing a lot of things I'd seen before and not enough things that I hadn't. Those things were really well done, but that doesn't make up for them being horribly unoriginal.
If you can quiet your brain enough to just watch and enjoy, this is worth seeing. Just don't expect to see much that is new.