Absolutely Fantastic

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Detective Sergeant Tom Brant (Jason Statham) is a hard cop in southeast London willing take anything including a hockey stick to the bad guys. Cops are being targeted. Sergeant Porter Nash (Paddy Considine) is brought in to head the manhunt. He's ridiculed for being gay but finds a supporter in Brant. The killer makes reporter Dunlop (David Morrissey) his contact. Brant and Nash zero in on Barry "Blitz" Weiss (Aidan Gillen) as their suspect. Brant remembers a run-in with him a year ago.This is a hard-boiled cop drama. This wants to be a gritty harsh movie. It does come off as another modern grim British TV cop show with bigger actors. Considine fits right in. Statham seems to be itching to be the Transporter. It wouldn't hurt him to play slightly against type especially in a movie which wants to be taken more seriously. I like the grim tone but Statham may be at cross-purposes.

Big regrets here. It was late. I was tired. I figured, I really didn't want to think too much, if at all, so I'll play it safe and just put a Statham flick on. I'm not familiar with the source material, but this will be weak tea for any Statham fan. Just lame, cliché-ridden, "Dirty Harry" stuff from beginning to end without any compelling story. The book has got to be better, it certainly couldn't be worse. Not quite as bad as a two, but no way I'll give it more than a three. Basically, I'm just so mad at myself--I could have grabbed so many other movies, and I went instead with this run-of-the-mill TV-grade pulp. At least it was short. My bad.

Let's get one thing straight; Jason Statham is the bad guy in this movie.Statham is a hybrid good-guy/bad-guy, but he isn't your likable criminal, a la Porter in Payback; he's a bad cop - a really bad one. He steals from merchants, physically attacks suspects and witnesses while causing SERIOUS bodily harm, barges into private residences without warrants to search and stare-down the occupants, and intimidates the good-guys in internal affairs who actually try to protect the people. Statham's character is exactly the kind of thug psychologists talk about when they say cops and gangsters often share the same psychological profile. He's the worst type of criminal - the kind that exploits a position of power and authority to abuse the helpless - and this movie expects the viewer to empathize with him: impossible.Sure, there's a guy out killing cops that the movie tries to build up as its villain, but this killer was CREATED by Statham's police brutality and the system's unwillingness to bring him to justice. The killer got the idea to kill cops after being beaten half to death in a bar by Statham's character - for a misdemeanor. Statham and other officers literally play the tape back at the station to laugh at Statham's egregious physical abuse of a civilian. If cops are allowed to act like thugs (aka, Jason Statham's character), the murderer starts to look somewhat like a misguided victim of circumstance, or even an anti-hero. He cannot get justice through the legal channels, so, rather than live in fear of future attacks from Statham's character, he takes matters into his own hands.Aiden Gillen's villain/victim is a character with a complex psychological background, a cause that is just in principle (though horribly unjust in execution), and with circumstances that are interesting enough to warrant a camera on his activities. The murderer deserves to be the main character, and he would be if this were a decent movie. Instead, the film remains an amalgam of cop and action movie, with a subtext of condoning extreme police misconduct.Statham's supporting cast acts a little predictably and wooden, and are difficult to empathize with, one-dimensional, and unlikable. This has much more to do with the writing than the actors themselves, but it is definitely a major impediment to the movie's development. One fellow officer berates a man on her first date for saying he'll call, but not telling her EXACTLY when (she accuses him of intentionally keeping her waiting). Another officer unnecessarily chews-out this same beau for dropping her off at home, but not walking her to the door, even as the beau shows up to make sure she's all right. Other scenes add nothing to the movie but filler. A few scenes are entirely unbelievable, such as when a man has a 2-minute death scuffle with an assailant in his apartment, then is beaten to death with a hammer, and none of his neighbors hears. Still, production quality, Jason Statham's action sequences, and the performance of Aiden Gillen bring this stinker up to a 4/10.

This may get better as it rolls along and a plot develops. I wouldn't know. I shouldn't really be leaving a comment because I only watched the five-minute opening scene and the credits.But if I can't tell you how it ends, I can give you some idea of how it begins. Jason Statham is a tall, brawny, bald-shaven brute with a mean expression. He's lying on his couch one night, looking bored, rises and glances out his window to see three hoodlums trying to force open the door of his car in the alley.Cut. Statham strides slowly towards the thugs, carrying what he describes to them as a "hurling stick." They begin to spit curses at him and pull box cutters on him. They've never seen a dumb action movie or they'd know this is a big mistake.Statham demolishes them with his stick and when they're on the pavement, groaning in pain, he kicks them and deliberately stabs a hood with his own box cutter. "Next time you pick a fight, choose the right weapon." The credits follow -- white block letters on a black background, spastic, dancing around, jumpy, manically mad.That was enough for me. I'd already gotten the moral message. From now on, action heroes will have to be practically illiterate -- and very bald and sweaty.