Oh, my head...

Rating: 4/10 (2 March 2013)

What to make of this film? In the first half, we have Washington and Fanning giving lovely performances as a bodyguard and bodyguardee, who bond as he looks after her. Of course, there has to be an eventual kidnapping, and that certainly happens.
The result of it should have had me in tears. I'm that kind of sap who would be heartbroken by such a thing, even in fiction. But I felt absolutely nothing, and part of that has to be because the characters themselves hardly seemed to have any emotion.
Warning - Spoiler Ahead! - They thought the girl had been killed, and yet her loved ones behaved more like they were just sad because she'd gone away for a while! I know it's each to his own, but I could not believe any loving mother (and an eventually loving bodyguard) would have reacted in such a subdued manner.
But anyway, once this does happen, it's "Death Wish" time, as Washington sets out to avenge all who are responsible for the dastardly dead. Director Scott threatens to give viewers permanent migraines with his dreadful, hyper-kinetic style, making the film look like a bad rap video, and as for the subtitles... Sometimes the characters speak in Spanish, sometimes in English. And sometimes the subtitles come up when they're speaking in Spanish, and sometimes in English! It's as if the subtitler couldn't keep up with the change in languages, like, "Oops, he spoke English there, I shouldn't have put that one up. Oh damn, missed that Spanish one!" And the way they zoomed in and out, went left to right, up and down... and whatever else they did... were they meant to be some kind of joke?
Somehow, despite the movie going on and on and on, and with all these flaws, it did keep my interest. Oddly, I think I should really hate the thing, and I'm not sure why I don't. Maybe that, no matter how bad some of it was, it was intriguingly so.
But I'd better stop thinking about it all now. I think I feel a migraine coming on.