James McAvoy plays the unconvincingly named Max Lewinsky, a hard boiled cop brought down when he lets Mark Strong's uber bad guy get the better of him. Years later when Strong's son is killed in a job gone bad he returns to England and resumes his dance with Lewinsky while uncovering all sorts of blah, blah, fucking blah.
McAvoy, once good in Shameless and great in The Last King of Scotland before never acting again, is so desperate to appeal to an American audience he even wears his watch upside down on the wrong wrist. Mark Strong, who I'm a big fan of, is actually quite convincing in parts and that somehow makes things worse. It makes you feel sorry for a good actor in a bad film, but I guess he's working and paying the bills.
The sets are cheap as hell, all empty night time shots and industrial studio motifs. Everything is done with this self-conscious, sudo cool effect, they even have the motorbikes used in the opening heist scene pulling away in formation wheelies.
If this had been made as a Saturday evening BBC1 try aimed at the Life on Mars/Spooks audience I'd have understood but been bloody angry at my licence fee being used on it, As it is, though I'm still annoyed that I wasted so much time watching this crap, I can laugh at the fact that it cost $8.5m to make and took $2500 on it's opening weekend.
Even Mark Strong's professionalism couldn't save this one.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1684233/?ref_=nv_sr_2
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