Mediocre, soulless, and somewhat boring

Rating: 2/10 (9 April 2018)

I often get tired of hearing "The book is better than the movie". I tend to give a lot of leeway to film adaptations of novels, understanding that there is often far too much material to delve into and that some things just don't work as well on screen as they do on the page. In this case, we have a clear example of a captivating, soulful, and socially insightful work of fiction completely stripped of any of the qualities that make it great. The action sequences in the film are fantastic, of course, if a little too fast to appreciate at times. I shan't get into details, but Wade's sheer wishy-washiness in the film, the lack of character development, the absence of genuine camaraderie, the lackadaisical writing, the formulaic speeches, and the addition of hackneyed structural tropes all combine to make the film much less than it could have been.