better than it oughtta be

Rating: 7/10 (12 June 2009)

The first half hour is not auspicious. By the numbers dialog and easy cheese plot points. Leland Orser as the oversympathetic friend (again), Xander Berkeley wasted in a nothing role (again), and why does that X-man chick with the exotic name keep getting work? Not a very interesting performer, except in MADE. I feel for Neeson, losing his pretty, talented wife and his viable career in the same decade, but maybe this one's some solace for him. Pretty good box office, doing good on video... but he SUCKS in it, again, wooden and not credible. I've never believed him except in that Woody Allen movie. Minute 30-something and I'm about to turn it off.
Then he gets to Paris. Suddenly this is a good movie. Good fights, especially Qui-Gon getting pulled out of a cab by the heels and conking his head on the curb. When he smacks his face on that sidewalk, I sit up. I'm interested. Not out of blood lust, but because something's happening. The movie is moving for the first time. The situations are now not quite as stock. I decide to give it another five minutes.
Which turns into the next hour. Nonstop violence in the b-movie mode, exciting and cheap and nasty and occasionally surprising just in the depths it's willing to go in investing its hero's need. Yes, it's silly: this guy is the Terminator, for no reason that's well enough explained in the story. He's the guy the phrase "one man army" was invented for. But this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and for a solid hour it's a very persuasive one.