A Travesty of a Film

Rating: 3/10 (20 August 2010)

I must admit that when I first saw trailers for this film I was extremely optimistic. I felt that any movie with such an abundance of action star-power had all the makings of a home run popcorn flick. Although I'm not much a fan of watching the nearly seventy-year old Sylvester Stallone act on screen, I still remained hopeful because of the film being graced with the presence of the ever-talent Mickey Rourke, and extremely exciting fight sequences with Jason Statham. The movie open almost immediately with gun-a-blazing. These scenes were far from impressive and the worst part is that the opening scene defines the film as a whole. One could have simply put this scene on replay for 100 plus minutes and ended up with the same results. A huge criticism about this film that seems almost unanimous by those who have given it a negative review is that there is "too much testosterone". Although there is no doubt that testosterone flows through this film like the Nile river, it was not the problem for this film. After watching the film, I realized that it was the perfect equation for how to not make a movie. It was a mixture of bad dialog, bad special effects, and bad acting (except for Mickey Rourke and Jason Statham). The dialog is meaningless through out the entire film and really presents no way for the different characters to connect with the audience. The most disappointing part of the film however was the horrendous special effects, which climax at the end of the film after one of the villains is shot to pieces and then has an enormous, Rambo-esquire knife fly through his chest which really solidified this film as being an overpriced, straight-to-DVD movie.