Hollywood remakes Raid 2 and calls it its own

Rating: 1/10 (23 February 2017)

I know this has polled (somehow) 8.3 on the IMDb Richter scale but I don't believe it. I also don't believe the amazingly positive review that's on the lead page, from Johhny Someone in Indonesia. I think that's industry hype. Where's the plot? This is a mashup of the Davinci Code, Raid 2 and Enter the Dragon - Markers? What markers? Where did they come from without explanation? OK, so in the first movie they kill his dog and fair enough, he gets upset and takes them all out, but this? He does a job he doesn't want to do because of the 'markers' - whatever and then they double cross him? What's the point of some stupid 'honour' system if it can be so easily countermanded? The point is to justify the excessive violence of the action scenes - and leave you with a cliffhanger just in case they think they can milk a third instalment out of the franchise. How many brains do you need to blow out in an action scene? Then I phone the special 'contract killers agency' with all the old fashioned secretaries doing the admin and then send text messages to all their handy agents. What a lot of contract killers New York has sitting around on the streets waiting for work and our wounded and somewhat tired hero suddenly is transported from Rome to New York and wanders around taking hits from all sides and yet still manages to take out all his assailants. It's not an action movie, it's a body count movie. Do we think for one minute that our hero is going to fail after seeing how many times his magic underwear protects him in Rome? This is the most ludicrous drivel that I have ever seen. It reminds me of that rubbish Salt when the super powered, anorexic, Angelina Jolie goes throughout the movie performing acts of the most incredible physical endurance which is exactly what anorexics are known for... Now let's talk about Keannu's acting or rather lack of it. Wooden would be an injustice to trees. You might think Ben Afflik is a bad actor but Keannu manages to make John Wayne look versatile, his weird, stilted delivery is apparently deliberate, but to what end? You can throw a million Lawrence Fishburns at a movie like this but you are not going to save it. So no humour, no suspense, just a whole load of set pieces that barely hang together, no character development, no nothing. You can see traces of the set pieces from the first Avengers movie as well. Some nice cinematography, congratulations to the art department, nice white, back lit subways, nice white and blue set pieces, nice classical music (like the first Avengers) to set the scene. Written and directed by men with the mental and emotional age of nine this movie will sink into the abyss and end up on the slag heap of movie history right next to Salt - where it justly belongs.