Nice but...

Rating: 6/10 (28 December 2009)

I'll start by saying I liked that movie... It's a basic action / thriller movie where you don't need to think really about what you're seeing, you kind of tag along for the ride, I enjoyed it, others might not depends on what you're excepting.
The sad part is that you kind of wonder how does everything add up right after the end which is so poor... Even if you're not an expert on demolition, spook stuff and so on, you can't avoid the part where you ask yourself " is that the best the characters can do ? " Let's take a look at the obvious first: - how does one buy even through a offshore company property next to a prison without anybody linking the company, the guy who owns the company and the transaction, even if it's offshore if you buy something in the US, the company name will appear at one point. When you're a suspect of murder, still committing some, everything about you and your know associates is looked up. Still it takes them for ever to link the two.

nobody noticed the drilling, well as we can see there must have been a lot of construction material, dirt and movement even if we consider 10 years the period of time, in such a sensitive place it does make any sense. And don't think it's worth talking of the cell's inspection...

after the threat is made against all members of the D.A.'s office, everybody leaves in his or her own car... The judge was already dead using her own cell phone. So even after they swept everyone's car, you wonder who's the moron in charge of security. And during the rest of the movie, everybody still uses his or her own laptop, cell phone, ...

the public enemy n°1 can travel freely and enter the city hall wearing a mustache and a cap, while the city is under a lock down. The security guard is unaware of the maintenance guy's replacement but still let's him through without checking with the company.

of course we don't know how does he gets access to the judge's phone, the cars in a prison parking lot or elsewhere if he planted the bombs before...

there's a hunt down for a suspect, a police car is stolen for several hours, the cop can't communicate with his central but nobody cares to check for it... ( police cars are jacked with some GPS device you can't remove ) Well to me that kind of stuff is obvious, if you're trying to convince us that the bad guy is really good at what he does, at least don't make the good guys look as if they were amateurs.

I might add that napalm, C4 and a remote machine gun / rocket launcher is the obvious stuff for someone who's supposed to be a brain for spooks and government's killers.
So even if the action and thrill is still good, there lot's of thinks that don't add up in the story...