(Review originally written at 14 August 2007)
It was surprising how brutal and straight-forward this movie actually was. It also at the same time made the movie a hard one to believe. I mean the Yun-Fat Chow character shoots criminals through the head at point blank for Christ sake and they give him medals for that! That's tough, even for a New York cop. It seems that they at all time try to aim for the head or heart, instead of just taking the criminal out by shooting in the leg or shoulder. And also innocent bystanders keep getting killed in the movie as if it means nothing. No way that this movie could had also still been made after 9/11.
It's the sort of story that makes things unnecessarily hard on itself, by putting in too many twist and turns, characters and individual plot lines. After a while I simply just stopped carrying what the movie was all about. It was that uninteresting.
Yun-Fat Chow and Mark Wahlberg really don't work well together. Normally this is good for a cop duo type of movie but however really not in this case, since it simply just not work out. Brian Cox also shows up in the movie. I love this guy but once you start thinking about it; is his role really necessary for the movie?
The movie itself is fairly well made. With a different script the movie would had definitely been a better one. The directing is good and fast and feels right for this type of movie and some of the camera-work is also great, though it also becomes obviously in the movie that it didn't really had the highest budget thinkable.
The action itself is fair. It's nothing too spectacular or memorable really. It features mostly the formulaic elements such as shoot-outs and one 'big' chase. It's forgettable, just like the rest of the movie.
Not a completely terrible movie but a very forgettable one.
5/10
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