Car Crashes and Explosions and That's It

Rating: 4/10 (8 July 2005)

This movie is for young teen and pre-teen boys, I guess. It's certainly not for adults of normal intelligence.
Woo's direction is hokey. The doves are too much John; does the movie have to be about you, every time?
Cruise's acting is hammy. One more boyish grin and I've had it.
Thandie Newton sleepwalks and looks as if she's starving to death. I ate two sandwiches just looking at her.
Brendan Gleeson was miscast; he is too tough-looking for the slimy character he plays. This is like one of the worst Batman scripts - a drug manufacturer wants to make everybody deathly ill so he can sell medicine to make them well? This is either comic-book stuff or extreme paranoia or else the pharmaceutical-FDA connection really is Satanic.
I did enjoy some of it; the adrenaline-pumping scenes are seductive for the little kid in all of us.
This is not a good movie, IMO. It fails everywhere: it is poorly written; poorly acted; poorly directed. That's my opinion, and it's very true. I am Don Coyote of OpinionSoup.