On the job

Rating: Null/10 (18 January 2015)

This is wholly forgettable, typical action and revenge, style as merely style.
The only way I can think of to describe it is this. An aging star or other has his agent fish around in the market for a script where he will have to look pained in spots, heroic in others. Liam Neeson seems to do this yearly. Denzel found a new franchise last year. Statham makes his living this way. There are probably any number of identical scripts floating around at any given time that fit the criteria, one is picked from an agency's hat or because it slightly stands out.
Someone is brought around to direct, a crew is assembled. Along the way a few spots open up for known actors to get a paycheck in return for a few minutes of screen time, a few of them here. Work is done, perhaps a hundred people go home with money to make mortgage, from set dressers to McShane. If decent enough, it makes up its money with some profit, viewers get their money's worth of gunplay.
There's nothing wrong with this, work is work, it's how anything gets done; it's that this particular one never convinces as anything other than what I just described, people dragging themselves out of bed to go to work, and this line of work has spoiled us to expect so much more than people simply doing it. When Dafoe talks with Reeves at a funeral within the first few minutes, that's not a conversation between characters who immerse themselves in the significance of some story, it's one actor standing where he was told to and repeating lines after the other has finished doing so.