Did they all really need the money?

Rating: 2/10 (2 September 2006)

This one gets a second star only because of showing Josh Hartnett in a very low-rise towel for the first third of the film... great eye candy, not great acting. The script is so full of holes and cartoony stereotypes that one is tempted to think of it as some sort of fable or allegory - but it has no message at all. Armed criminals are displaying a hot young man with a beaten-up face in only a towel on crowded Manhattan streets and nobody notices? A major crime boss with megabucks has former Mossad agents guarding his son in a specially-secured room and they have no closed-circuit monitors and must protect him by blindly busting through a plaster wall? Both crime bosses have sentinels posted on the terraces outside their windows that just happen to vanish when they are assaulted by a strange young man that they don't really trust? Most disturbing is the awfully bigoted stereotyping... the African Americans who are all in crime, especially the two Amos and Andy style thugs who first kidnap the lead.... the Jews, who only use their religion as a front for evil, with Stars of David everywhere, almost like villains in a comic book... and of course, the crooked Italian cop. Just to avoid being called on their prejudices, the producers gratuitously throw in an Asian woman (who is culturally very assimilated, except when she eats noodles in one scene). All very cynical and very Hollywood. What is the moral of this film? Nothing - the good white gentile killers blow away all the evil ethnic killers. Great, guys.... another uplifting addition to Western culture. The only good news about this film is that apparently it didn't do well at the US box office... hope the same happens here in Europe.