I’m not sure what to say about this pretentious, explicitly
Freudian crime drama (when I say “pretentious” I mean
“opens-by-quoting-Julius-Caesar-and-chess-theory” and when I say “explicitly Freudian,” I mean
“ends-with-actual-psychoanalyst-types-lecturing-the-audience”) except that it’s
one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time. Divorced from his usual
ass-kicking context, Jason Statham loses most of his star appeal, and Ray
Liotta has a gamely unhinged presence here that functions as a welcome
distraction from his tedious narrative surroundings rather than an actual
performance. The story works on two levels. On one, it’s a bunch of generic hoo-hah
about a casino owner (Liotta), a conman with a grudge (Statham), and a couple
of mysterious thugs (Vincent Pastore and André Benjamin). On another, it’s a
breathtakingly silly melodrama about the internal tensions between the ego and
the id. Liotta and Statham’s high-decibel dramatizations of that conflict, seen
in close-up and among quick edits — obviously devised as showpiece segments —
are especially headache-inducing. Only a subplot involving a minor character,
the stoic assassin Sorter (Mark Strong), who is eventually seen resolving his
own internal tensions in spectacular, stylishly violent fashion, succeeds by at
least delivering a gratuitous thrill. Otherwise, it’s an embarrassing failure. D
