Nonsense; but somewhat entertaining

Rating: 2/10 (4 February 2004)

It started off okay: the Italian heist scene; But when one of the thief crew, (Edward Norton), decides to take the gold for himself, the situation resulted into the rest of the crew ending up in freezing water, for several minutes - the death time exposure would kill anybody, but the crew lived through it. There must have been some heavy doses of vitamin intake by those guys in preparation for unusual events, because, not only did they live through that, they sat around on the rocks beside the water, in that freezing cold, pondering their next move, which of course, was revenge. And then, the double-crossing 'Norton' ended up in Los Angeles, of all places. Shamefully the movie reverted to a lower class atmosphere. With the 35 million in gold, Norton then buys a house that looks to be worth 30 million. Doesn't figure? To which then all he does, and is concerned about, is to watch TV. Mark Wahlberg gets Charlize Theron, (the daughter of the only crew member to die), to help with the revenge plan; she's a safe-cracking specialist with an idiot passion for driving outrageously. Some hype dung there. Matter of fact there's hype dung everywhere. You've got your typical computer geek--nothing new there. But you don't have your typical ladies man--this guy looks like a street fighter losing his hair, and he's used to seduce a TV cable woman for the purpose of arranging, (wouldn't you know), the look-alike Charlize into getting inside Norton's house: a house that Charlize scans for a safe that might have the gold. Okay, continuing in short: getting to that safe is complex and watchable--street traffic scenes highlight the obtaining of the truck containing the safe. But . . . Man O Man . . . With those dinky cars that they used to transport the gold: one scene--get this, they went into a subway rail system by driving along the platform and then take a right turn to get onto those tracks (ten feet below)! Man, that's just so damn undoable: in actuality they would have nose-dived . . . Crashed and piled up. And that's this movie; it's full of the undoable! --Made because Hollywood only cares about entertainment, not quality. Edward Norton had been getting some respect from me, but now I've lowered him a notch or two. As for the rest of the crew (other than Sutherland): give them pink slips and directions to the Salvation Army.