gordean

At the twenty minute mark I expect to have some emotional stake in the storyline and care about what happens to the characters. Unfortunately, this film's fragmented narrative structure didn't keep me connected long enough to any of the threads to care about the storyline or the characters. I found myself asking "why do I want to see more events involving this character?" The threads are each far too fragmented, frankly there are too many of them, and the stationary mise-en-scène may have looked interesting in the first treatment, but the execution is lackluster and makes the film's realm feels small, and the the technical constraints of a stationary camera and a constant setting end up requiring over-exposition from several characters in order to convince me that there's even a world outside of this unchanging room. This would've made a better YouTube short or featurette.

The supposed "experts" who were interviewed spoke so informally and injected so much hyperbole and conjecture that so much of what they said was dubious. This could've been fixed in script or editing (but it wasn't). I found myself exclaiming aloud incredulously innumerable times and, frankly, this was a difficult series to finish watching. The reenactments are the only redeeming part of this series-most everything else (aka the facts) were presented so informally and almost anecdotally, which is not how you want to present a documentary series about history. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Oh, and if you're going to make your narrator a diversity hire, do make sure they can pronounce words that are germane to the subject matter, like "politburo."

Guy Ritchie has sadly lost his flair. Gone are the days of the innovative British Gangstar picture with such notable archetypes as Lock/Stock and Snatch. This movie is very mainstream and generic, with barely even a few moments of clever dialogue peppered throughout.

It almost seems like Statham knew this whilst filming and his impatience with a lackluster storyline actually comes through onscreen.

Other talents were... not wasted, but definitely not used to their potentials.

So, generic plot, generic bad guys, generic good guys, and generic denoument (which you'd be forgiven for missing), all sadly contribute to an unfortunately generic film.