Bullets over (and under and sideways) Broadway

Rating: 3/10 (27 April 2015)

I'm not familiar with the source comic book but after two hours of this blockbuster I'll not be subscribing anytime soon. I know that films like this aren't really aimed at my age-group, but when done really well ("The Matrix", Avengers Assemble") even I can get it.
The movie starts with a bloody bang, literally, as we're introduced to the main trick employed throughout, a slow-motion bending bullet, something we've already seen before in "The Matrix", and which gets done to death (no pun intended) as the movie progresses.
If I was trying to be positive, I could say it's fast-moving, flashy and expensive-looking. It's much easier though to say it's relentless, trashy and ultimately empty. I didn't like the constant profanity, I felt the blood and guts gore was overdone and the sex scenes, whilst brief and usually involving "worm-that turns" James McAvoy's boorish, bullying so-called best friend banging his girl-friend, crude and gratuitous. There's precious little leavening humour, the body count is massive and accelerates as the finish approaches plus I vaguely mind seeing good actors like McAvoy and Morgan Freeman wasting and hardly extending themselves in easy pay-days like this.
McAvoy as the central character undergoes the biggest metamorphosis since Dr Jeckyll drank his potion, going from put-upon office nerd to a pumped-up killing machine who even gets to snog fellow-agent Angelina Jolie along the way. There's a biggish plot-twist of the Luke Skywalker variety and a massive SFX episode involving a train crash but for me the latter wasn't as big as the movie itself from which I found myself derailed very early on and never climbed back on board again.