From the good ol’ days of henchmen and natural disasters, Taylor Sheridan’s new release is about as cheesy as the action genre comes. The multi-layered story of espionage, conspiracy and murder thrown together with Angelina Jolie as a firefighter is oftentimes messy, but at least initially, promising. Sheridan’s good eye for visual splendour and flowy action movements is still as good, as always.
There’s no headache-y shaky cam and the eventual action bits are pretty intense. The cast is giving their all too with Jolie, Bernthal, Hoult and Gillen being the highlights. Young Finn Little continues to break the child actor curse, consistently being very convincing and emotional. It’s a shame then that this movie, while ripe with potential, is absolutely nothing to write home about. I forgot the majority of it by the time it ended and most of it has to do with the screenplay. There are so many clichés, predictable moments and dead gaps between the action that do very little to keep your attention.
Ideas are thrown around with no real thought and it’s very hard to tell exactly what the movie means. Sure, you can say this is a pumped and thoughtless action flick but the confusing thematic push for importance clashes with that mission statement. Flickers of decent action between longer moments of mundane confusion only do so much to make Sheridan’s new flick a decent watch at best, and utterly boring at worst.
“Five out of ten, what does that title even mean anyway?”
