Empire State (2013) Directed by Dito Montiel

This movie is more predictable than a bad B-movie and therefore also quite a bad and boring one.

It's amazing really; all of the right ingredients for a good movie were here. A good and interesting sounding concept, a decent cast and the fact that it's based on a true story. Nothing about this movie would indicate to you that it's a bad one, until you start watching it.

Pretty much from the first minute on already it started to annoy me. There are very little things more annoying than watching a bunch of guys act like tough guys, while they obviously aren't. Something so incredibly fake and annoying about it. I don't know, perhaps I have seen a few too many movies like this already. It basically makes it hard to ever care for any of the characters, when they are constantly acting like a bunch of tough-talking buffoons. And it's not like any of the main characters are doing 'good' things. They really are all a bunch of criminals, no matter how you look at it and some of them also do some absolutely despicable things.

But really, that's hardly the only problem of this movie. The weird thing about the movie is that about halfway through, things start to shift and it starts to become about something completely different, once it decides to change its main focus. Suddenly the Liam Hemsworth character isn't the main one anymore and all of the sudden it decides to focus on the good cop that's after him, played by Dwayne Johnson. It's a weird shift really. What was it trying to do and achieve with it? Who were we supposed to root for, toward the end? It doesn't help much that the Dwayne Johnson character isn't a very well developed one. He just shows up but we don't know anything about him at all, purely because the movie doesn't give you any background information on him, or tells you his character's motivation.

There also isn't any real excitement in this movie, which is disappointing for a movie that loves to present itself as an action heist movie. It's not as if this movie is ever trying to be a serious or dramatically deep one. It clearly was going for a more fast and entertaining type of approach but there just isn't ever enough action or fun. The movie actually gets quite boring to watch after a while, which also is really due to the fact of this movie being an incredibly formulaic and predictable one. Seriously, nothing happens as a surprise in this movie and you can see all of its 'twists' and events coming from miles away already, which is all really due to the movie its own storytelling.

Now, really this isn't the worst movie you could ever watch but at the same time, why should you watch it in the first place? There is absolutely no reason for it in my opinion! There obviously are countless, far better, genre movies out there, you can have a whole lot of more fun with as well.

5/10

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