Well Made Junk, It's a Mindless Hollywood Action "Spy" Movie

Rating: 2/10 (28 March 2014)

This movie has about as much relation to spy craft as watching a Star Trek TV program would help you understand the Apollo space program, but without even the occasional social moral theme that Trek throws in . Nothing in in made any sense. Spies aren't killer cyborgs who can burst into a building and disable trained guards and agents with bare hands or improvise Rube Goldberg devices then deactivate complicated electro-mechanical systems as if they designed and built them themselves. She made Rambo look like a drunk college baseball player fighting in a local college bar on Friday night. She seemed to have the same mythical warrior invincibility as Alice the Enhanced One has in all those Resident Evil movies & video games. I realize that James Bond commando kung fu trained warriors are the norm in movies these days, but at least James Bond used to be novel and humorous, unlike our Terminatrix here.
The climax involved a couple of Russian deep plant agents taking over the Whitehouse and president so they can launch nuclear weapons, natch. "Whitehouse Down" and "Olympus Has Fallen" had similar plot lines but there at least there was a whole bunch of bad guys, and lots of them were killed fighting the various security forces stationed there. But here one of the agents runs interference for our female cyborg by detonating a suicide bomb vest all of 10' from her, in an underground corridor. But our female terminator was barely fazed by the enormous blast. Or in an earlier scene, she stages this elaborate kill operation on the president of Russia in a cathedral in NYC where she sets up all sorts of stunts and booby traps in a place she was utterly unfamiliar with & had all of five minutes to set up the stunts that worked perfectly. Then she takes out 3 NYC cops in an SUV while in cuffs. Not just that but she used a stun gun to get the driver to shift gears, apply the gas or steer the wheel as if she tapped right into to his neural pathways with the zapper. That was so silly it even one upped the rest of the stunts; and it was pretty sadistic thing to do to some schmoe cop who was just doing his job.
I watched it because the highway scene was filmed nearby and I borrowed the DVD gratis. If you like a lot of action but don't care about plot or even a glimmer of reality to the script, then you might like it.
That being said, Jolie did well with her limited female kill-bot role. The black CIA Guy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, did well too. The rest of the cast, including wooden Liev Schreiber, were adequate at best. There is nothing I took out of this movie worth remembering save some well done but a load of "impossible in real life" stunts. Even the paper thin veneer of humanity and ambiguity most of the fawning reviews spoke of are flat. We knew she was some fancy Russian Manchurian double agent type, something about being conditioned in Russia when she was young by the same guy who ratted her out later. That had been established early in the movie. It was easy to predict that she was a good bad guy character who in the end wouldn't do anything very heinous, She'll just kill lots of bad bad guys but only seriously disable the good ones.