Dumb but watchable

Rating: 5/10 (8 September 2008)

I don't think the movie is all that bad. It has some nice action scenes and effects, it has Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie, and there's some humor.
On the minus side, the movie seems a lesser adaption of Matrix, and it's quite stupid at that. The narrator, who is a loser, is the one the viewers are supposed to identify with. We know so because he permanently rubs into our faces that we were losers like him. He is then adopted by a gang of assassins whose supernatural capabilities are unexplained and whose motives are explained but more than questionable. After he joined, it turns out that their idea of employment is basically to beat the **** out of him. Now that's a training that would have made "The Karate Kid" a much more fun movie, but here it's one of the things that made me wonder why lil' Wannabe-Neo so desperately wants to become one of them. After all, they are quite a fascist bunch.
Luckily, the movie was too stupid to actually get me irritated by such nasty details, so I could at least enjoy the mindless action, though there's not as much of it as could be desired.