Utter crap!

Rating: 1/10 (22 March 2002)

John Woo proves to us again that once he doesn't have Chow Yun-Fat's deadly charisma at his side to save his ass, he is all hype and no go. We all know by now that John Woo's unabashed over-sentimentalist approach is enough to make some people puke, and this movie is no different. But that's just him, besides he does have an uncanny ability to choreograph graceful gunfights, so I'll leave him at that. The real problem however is that Tom Cruise is only an average actor (see him over-acting in Magnolia). Throughout the movie, I cannot identify his struggles against the "bad guys" no matter how much I want to, so therefore I fail to see the relevance of this movie. Whatever happened to the good old days when Bruce Willis captured the audience's sympathise in Die Hard? Anyhow being a big-budgeted movie, the stunt sequences just tries TOO hard to impress the audience, but again what does it have to do with anything? Its just eye-candy, and its not THAT great to begin with. So I sat there in the theatre, bored to tears, wishing that I didn't took a chance on this worthless flick.