Film Reviews by GC

The games that inspired this abomination at least had exciting action, and an inspired graphic art visual style, even if the stories were a little weak.

The only thing this movie shares with those attributes is the weak story.

There are some great actors involved, but they are embarrassingly miss-cast in an action movie. Several of the lead characters are actually old enough to be the parents of the characters in the source material. Just wrong.

Anyone with even a little discerning judgement would have been able to predict that this would be a flop. It is hard to imagine the Hollywood studio idiocy that allowed this movie to end up the way it did. The emperors new clothes spring to mind.

The movie is good, but at the time of writing it is only available as a 4:3 letterboxed (not anamorphic) DVD. This makes for a ridiculously low pixel resolution which would be less than ideal on an SD screen and (for me anyway) is painful to watch on a HD or higher screen even with AI upscaling.

Unfortunately I can't recommend watching this movie in this format.

This is an enjoyable action flick. The plot, script, and acting are all way better than average for the genre. It's not particularly original, but it has an impressive cast and is very well made. It has a strong female lead who looks genuinely believable in the action scenes. Gina Carano looks the part, and is impressively physically capable.

Soderberg and his DOP manage to bring an entirely appropriate sense of bleakness to the visuals, adding to the a sense of gritty reality that makes the action scenes all the more effective.

You'll see some awful reviews for this film, not sure why, the film I saw definitely doesn't deserve them (probably best not to waste your time watching action movies if you don't like them). This film is actually quite good, so definitely worth a watch if you have an open mind on the genre and aren't expecting anything too creatively worthy.