Decent acting and exciting scenes almost save it.

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 2004)

I caught this on the cable TV last night, and probably would have liked it better in the theater. It really needs to be on a big screen for good impact. The acting is passable to very good, but these are characters we've all seen before with very little beyond stereotypes. The whole story is telegraphed in the first half hour and the only thing to keep interest is how they'll do it. We know they'll go after the gold and get even with Steve, but how will it be done? That's really the only question in any of these gang retaliation type of stories. Basically these are set up so that we have a bunch of bad guys versus a bunch of worse bad guys, so we root for the lesser bad guys. Really typical and not at all original. And the character of Steve by Edward Norton was more like Norton of THE HONEYMOONERS. What an incompetent and weak-kneed crime lord. He looked as though he could have been done in by a minimum wage security guard. Definitely in the running for the puniest criminal in film history.