Three hours I'll never get back!

Rating: 1/10 (22 March 2006)

To me, a movie should be foremost entertaining. The better movies tell a story and/or provoke thought and/or provoke emotions. I had been wanting to see this movie for a couple of years when I finally rented it a few days ago. What a disappointment it was! This movie did a good job of provoking thought and emotions and managed to tell a story that flowed poorly. What this movie didn't do was entertain. In fact, this has to be the most boring movie I'll ever watched in its entirety. After seeing this movie, I almost feel like I could go back and watch the final 70 minutes of Birth or the last hour of The Master of Disguise....but I won't.
It was an hour into the movie before I could pay enough attention to learn a characters name. It actually managed to be interesting enough for around 20 minutes during their captivity and escape for me to not turn it off then. It also verged on entertaining the 10 or so minutes right before Michael found Nick up until the point Nick lost the game of Russian Roulette. I can't see putting maybe 30 minutes of sub-par entertainment in with another 2 1/2 hours of extremely hard to watch storyline and call it a movie.
On the upside, the acting was very good (as most have come to expect from De Niro and Walken).