(This review may contain spoilers).
While I wouldn’t necessarily make a point of seeing this kind of movie, I was intrigued by the advert and since I had free time today, I decided to watch it.
While the movie did do a good job of establishing the action from the beginning, I did think that it was hard to connect emotionally to most of the characters. I’m also not really sure how the title fit in with what was going on in the movie, since neither of the definitions had very much to do with the actual plot.
It was interesting to see characters who were operating outside of the law, though I would have liked to know exactly why Kate was recruited by the task force. She didn’t seem to do all that well under that kind of pressure, even though I did think Emily Blunt portrayed the character really well.
I found Alejandro a character who was really hard to get behind. While there were some hints of him being a character with deeper motivations, I didn’t feel that his past was shown enough. The same with Matt. He didn’t come across as a very nice character and there weren’t enough details about him to give him many obvious redeeming qualities.
I really liked the friendship between Kate and Reggie and I would have liked to see more of them interacting with each other. I did also think that the scenes of the father and his son worked particularly well, especially since the character there did have a part to play later on… even if there were some quite sad scenes.
There was quite a lot of violence and the first scene did a good job of establishing the feel of the whole movie. There were some particularly effective scenes, especially when it came to looking at the environment through the night vision goggles the characters were wearing.
This film was entertaining, but I think it would have been good to get more background of the characters early on. There wasn’t really enough about them to allow me to emotionally connect… and I was disappointed in the ending.
I don’t think I’d watch this film again, but it did draw me in and there were some nice atmospheric scenes, as well as some good actors.
