Dir. Nimrod Antal, US, 2009, 88 mins
Cast: Matt Dillon, Columbus Short, Laurence Fishburne
Review by Carol Allen
It's a bit of a mystery as to how a run of the mill heist thriller like this, which has the feel of a made for television movie, managed to attract such a good cast. As well as Dillon and Fishburne, Jean Reno and Skeet Ulrich help to make up the gang, with veteran Fred Ward in a tiny part.
The hero though is played by comparative unknown Short as Ty, a young veteran of the Iraq war, with sole responsibility for his younger brother and a stack of bills to pay. His godfather Michael (Dillon), who heads up a team of security guards, offers him a job. When the team come up with what looks like a foolproof plan for robbing one of their own vans with no-one getting hurt, Ty at first refuses but his financial needs get him to change his mind. Inevitably the plan goes wrong. A homeless man and a cop, who stumble upon the robbers, become the victims and it's up to Ty, who's the good guy in the story, to try and put things right.
It's frankly all a bit formulaic. Very much a boys' film with lots of big, butch trucks and guns on show, a perfectly balanced team from an ethnic point of view - black, white, Hispanic and even a Frenchman - and they scrap and fall out amongst themselves in a totally predictable fashion. It also takes a very long time to get going and establish its clichéd characters, considering the type of movie it is, and the action sequences, when we finally get to them, aren't particularly impressive.
Short is a likeable hero as Ty, Dillon does his best as Michael the leader, including coping with an unbelievable change in his character towards the end, but Fishburne can do little with the one dimensional role of the hotheaded Baines, who likes nothing better than to shoot his gun at every possible opportunity. And as for Reno, he has very little to do at all. It's all a bit of a waste of some fine actors. To damn with faint praise though, it is rather well shot. |
