Overview
After faking his death, a tech billionaire recruits a team of international operatives for a bold and bloody mission to take down a brutal dictator.
When you find out that a movie is directed by Michael Bay, you know you are in for a high octane action flick with explosions… lots of explosions… And when you are going to see a Ryan Reynolds movie, you know you can expect a special kind of humour – mischievous is one way to describe it maybe. So what do you get when these two work together? An all ‘new kind of action hero’ movie apparently. I guess that is a fair description; unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily make it any good.
Ryan Reynolds plays ‘One’, a tech billionaire who brings together a team of private mercenaries to fight injustice around the world. His team members each excel at what they do (“the hitman”, “the driver”, “the sniper”, “the doctor” and “the thief”), and are all dead to the world so as to make them harder to identify and trace. In this movie, they choose to fight the tyrannic ruler of Turgistan. The rest of the ‘plot’ isn’t all that relevant, this movie is clearly intended to just be a visual spectacle and thrill-ride.
And Michael Bay delivers on that, and then some. Just a few minutes in, you start to wonder if Michael Bay could out-Michael Bay Michael Bay. And after another few minutes, you know that indeed he can. Not long after that you begin to wonder if there is such a thing as too much Michael Baying a Michael Bay movie. And soon your suspicions are confirmed: this movie is just too Michael Bay, even for Michael Bay…
There isn’t just more action than in any other Michael Bay movie before, with more explosions and more gory scenes than ever before, the style is also even more frantic than ever before. The editing often feels frenzied with many cuts that often don’t last much more than a second, and the jumps between flashbacks and the present feel just as hectic and jarring at times.
The action never really lets up, yet, I found myself starting to get bored about half way through, and as this is on Netflix it was tempting to just turn it off. There just isn’t enough to the plot to care about any of the characters – you don’t cheer for the good guys, and you don’t really care about the bad guys either. Everyone is a mere cardboard character in this universe, including lead Ryan Reynolds.
Many of the action scenes are visually spectacular and in that way fun to watch for a few minutes. As a 2 hour movie it’s just all too much with very little of interest to keep you engaged. I never quite agreed with the hate Bay often gets for his action flicks – they were just fun. But I admit this time Bay has outdone himself, and not in a good way…
★★☆☆☆
