Deliriously loopy, hysterically bad

Rating: 2/10 (18 February 2008)

I finally caught up with this only recently, and had to keep pulling my jaw up from the floor. What a deliriously bad, hysterically loopy film this is. It's as if Scorcese had dozed off in front of "Goodfellas" one night after eating a cheese and garlic pizza, and thinking, "How can I top this.top this.top this" And this film is the result. Not so much a film, but a dream of a film, one that defies any sort of logic. There's a rat in the gang. Could it be the ex-cop who's always on his phone? Nope, because after all  they asked him, and he said it wasn't. Well, fair enough. Meanwhile, there's a rat in the police force. Could it be the cop who grew up under the wing of the mobster under investigation, the one who leaps onto his phone in full view of everyone as soon as an operation against said mobster is announced? Naaaah. Meanwhile we also have a police psychiatrist who, as luck would have it, is gorgeous and who, as her sense of professionalism would have it, thinks it's okay to sleep with not just one but two of her clients.
A definition of a bad film, (which I read on a website dedicated to bad films) states that you know you're watching a bad film when the plot will only progress if the characters act stupidly.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of those films.
To be fair, Damon and Cipriano are surprisingly good, the latter, in particular, having developed a leaner, meaner look than he's known for. Unfortunately, these are balanced out by average, TV-movie performances by Sheen and Baldwin, a bogglingly bad one by Wahlberg (a piece of wood rolled on to bark rude comments) a stunningly confused one by Ray Winstone (what is that accent again?) and thenthere's Jack. Any hopes that this might be one those roles that allow him to recall his acting skills are swiftly ditched by the scenery-chomping on display here, as if Nicholson were bored and decided he could only get through it by making it as surreal as possible, meanwhile coming across as neither Irish nor Bostonian. He's no longer an actor, he is a performer, a grandstander, and this is what you get. If you don't want characterisation or subtle emotions, you call Jack. You also, in his wake, get the wildly uneven tone, veering into off-the-wall black humour (the hand at the breakfast table  what was with THAT?) and moments so throwaway it looked for all the world as if they were being made up on the spot (Nicholson appearing, covered in blood). The end piles on twist upon twist and body upon body which, on the surface, are entertaining enough, but just don't hold up to any sort of scrutiny (and the psychiatrist does what with the tapes?) A passable no-brainer action film, and an entertaining exercise in loopy film-making from a director who should know better, praised by fans and critics who should also know better.