percevial

There's really nothing special about the story, but Dinklage and Weist put in solid performances. They both bring the right mood to their characters. I also enjoyed Nicholas Logan's performance; he does a bang-up job portraying a sinister, awkward, quirky wingman.

Denzel carries his role well. Malek didn't seem to connect with the character he was portraying, and Leto's character just isn't believable-forced. The plot twists are far too easy to read, and everything moves as a monotone, anticlimactic pace. The choice of Detective Baxter that causes his demise make no sense. Supposedly good cops/officials doing bad/illegal things for supposedly good reasons is a storyline we've seen enough of. Let's move on.

The best performances in are by Iko Uwais (Li) and Lauren Cohan (Alice). Ironically, they have the least lines, but they're talented actors who use nonverbals in a way that make their work believable. Wahlberg (James) and Malcovich (Bishop) do plenty of talking that's intended to sound profound but doesn't. Wahlberg's performance was in my opinion the weakest. I kept thinking he was an angry version of the character he's played in Transformers. This is a boom boom movie and that's about all it can be. It's fairly cliché but has several good action sequences-particularly those with Uwais.