A film that should have been better, but unfortunately had a mediocre director.
Not everything in the movie is bad, but overall this could have been a great movie.
Well, let's start with the good stuff:
Jason Statham works well in an action movie as usual. Stallone is in his element, although it would be better if he was a little more in the film. Iko Uwais is not bad at all as a villain and he is a good addition to the film. Andy Garcia is also a good choice for this movie. The rest of the team is mostly good, with a few exceptions, some should have maybe gotten a little more time in the movie.
And now, the bad part:
The biggest problem with this movie is the mediocre director. If they had a better director, this film could have been great, it turned out to be just tolerable, and that's because most of today's film production is garbage.
There is too much "shaky camera" that makes every movie look worse than it really is. Such scenes simply look cheap.
The CGI looks pretty bad, which is odd considering this isn't a cheap movie, but a bad director made it look cheap.
The film lacks that real cinematic look, I don't know if it's because of the type of camera, so everything looks too artificial, it doesn't have the look that older films had, where everything looked monumental. This looks like a documentary, with ultra-sharp resolution, and yet it looks cheap, as if we're looking through a window.
Basically, the director is the worst thing about this movie, everything else is not nearly as bad, not even some really hilarious casting choices.
In the end, the film could have been great, it turned out to be just another mediocre film, and it's sad that even as such it is better than most of what "modern film production" offers us today.
