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King Kong ain't got
nothing on me! Whatever. Never have I heard such drivel from Academy
Award nominated performance. Shit, any idiot can play a bad guy. Now
don't get me wrong, I think Denzel is a great actor, but this role
was just too easy-and too lame. The screenwriter also wrote The
Fast and the Furious, for God's sake. The guy made cartoon characters,
not living, breathing people. I was waiting for Denzel to start twirling
his handlebar moustache. He's so damn dastardly! I'm also not buying
Mr. Washington as a bad guy. It's like seeing Lawrence Olivier play
Genghis Khan or something. No matter how hard Denzel tries, he's not
"street." His look, his words, his swagger isn't natural.
I know this is shocking, but Ethan Hawke's performance is actually
a much better one. He displays a great range of emotion and doesn't
push things too much. Now, do I buy him as a police officer? No, he's
entirely too scruffy and greasy-in other words, he's Ethan Hawke.
There's just nothing real about this movie. It feels like it takes
place on some Hollywood set where the characters take smoke breaks
together between scenes. Cops interact with gang members in unrealistic
ways, while Denzel's larger-than-life chews up the scenery from edit
to edit. Scott Glenn plays some sort of drug dealer guru, which makes
absolutely no sense, and merely adds to the claustrophobic sense of
the whole movie taking place inside the pages of a script. Add to
that outrageous coincidences that lead to major plot advances, stupid
chase scenes and some drawn-out monologues and you have what amounts
to as pretty flaccid film. Of course the whole thing adds in a hail
of bullets (as always), as the cop-outs continue. I know people like
this movie (including the Academy), but I feel like some people are
too easily swayed by suggestion in cases like this. Ultimately, the
film felt very small and unremarkable. [DVD]
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