I was able to see this movie in an advance screening Wednesday night and I'd love to talk about it.
The most-developed characters in this movie are Mark Wahlberg's James Silva and Lauren Cohan's Alice Kerr. James Silva was a gifted youth whose family died in an accident leaving him an orphan, perfect for the government to train into becoming the leader of this top-secret tactical unit. As an adult, he is hotheaded, antisocial, and confrontational but his unique mental state, fierce intelligence, and advanced training make him a highly-focused, intense, and effective leader both in and out of combat. He wears an elastic band around his wrist and snaps it any time he grows irritated with the slow pace of the people around him - a habit carried over from childhood that, due to his frequent irritation, punctuates most of his sentences. He commonly goes by Jimmy. Alice Kerr is shown to be a highly-capable agent, introduced to us as a little more hands-on than Silva, as the opening scene shows her and the rest of the team conduct a raid while Silva hangs back to provide support from outside the house. We learn that Alice had responsibility over that raid, following through on information she acquired from a source she trusted, and that raid acts as an inciting incident spurring on the rest of the plot. In addition to her competency and responsibility within the unit, we see that, unlike Silva, Alice has a personal life outside of her work - she is a mother stressed by having to deal with a manipulative ex who has custody of her daughter. The movie spends a little too much time on Silva's metal state and Alice's stressful family, making it sometimes seem like these are their defining traits. There is a little more development of their characters beyond what I've written, and this honestly seems fairly good by action-movie standards, but these two still came across as underdeveloped.
Iko Uwais' character, Li Noor, is the next-best developed, as he becomes central to this story. The character is kept fairly mysterious, throughout, and has few lines, but his actions speak louder than words. As a fan of The Raid, I found his presence in this film to be a pleasant surprise due to the promise of some excellent martial-arts action but I'll get to that later. Going back to the team of secret government agents Jimmy Silva leads into battle, beyond Alice Kerr there is Ronda Rousey's Sam and Carlo Alban's Douglas. Neither get much development at all, but they both get at least one fairly emotive scene. There are a couple other field agents with them, I guess, but they are not memorable at all. Behind the scenes, Jimmy Silva's team is commanded by John Malkovich's character, code-name Bishop, who acts as eye-in-the-sky operating out of a secure room in which he coordinates the efforts of the field team with help from a number of technical people. The techs get some opportunities to show character, more so than Bishop and the forgotten field members, but are still pretty forgettable. Malkovich's Bishop is pretty flat, many of his lines feeling like he's just reading them, but that could largely be due to his trademark style of oration.
Enough about characterizations; this movie isn't setting out to be a great drama but was conceived to be "the new wave of combat cinema" so, how's the action? Well, the movie takes a little while to get the action going. The raid that begins the film serves as an engaging way to introduce our protagonists and the action cinematography is decent in this first scene. The filmmakers try to keep the tension high during the downtime that follows the team's completion of that mission by focusing on the combative way in which Silva interacts with his team and on Alice Kerr's combative relationship with her ex. The next proper action scene takes a while to arrive but it lets Iko Uwais show off his martial-arts prowess in an exciting and memorable sequence that establishes the importance of his character, Li Noor. Ronda Rousey's physical presence and MMA experience are wasted here, as her character, Sam, is largely restricted to gun-play. I'm pretty sure Wahlberg gets more scenes of hand-to-hand combat than Rousey. Unfortunately, the car chases, explosions, gun-play, and limited martial-arts action that follow Iko Uwais' show-stealing scene largely feel pretty standard and suffer from problems with choreography, action cinematography or editing.
Far too much of the action is over-edited, making it a choppy, hard-to-follow mess. I suspect, but cannot solidly confirm, that the many cuts within the action forced the viewer to look to different parts of the frame, hurting these scenes and exasperating the feeling. Irresponsible camera-shake was also noticed. These problems extend to the entirety of the film, plaguing conversation scenes with their overuse of close-ups and fast cuts between characters. Further complicating this, the film frequently punctuates the main story and action with cuts to different characters in different locations or even different points in time. There are many cuts away from Silva's field team to Bishop's group of techs working out of their safe room. The film is told as something of a debriefing, after-the-fact, so many scenes are punctuated by a cut to Silva providing additional after-the-fact context and story, before returning to the main timeline where all the action is. These aren't bad things, on their own, but they contributed to the feeling that the movie was over-edited and, while I was fairly certain I had absorbed all the exposition and information provided throughout, I still left the movie feeling I must have missed something. Given the way the story was told, it's likely I did. Of course, that's not terrible, either; it's gotten me interested in watching it again or in finding someone else who's seen it to discuss it.
I have a few issues with character motivations & actions that seemed unusual, uncalled for, or poorly written. These may come from misunderstandings or just be pointless nitpicks, and discussing them strays a bit too far into spoiler territory, so I'll keep discussion of those to spoiler tags.
Ultimately, I can't recommend seeing this at full price. Being a nice action romp, it would be fun to see on a big screen in a cheap theater but, even then, it is a bit lacking in spectacle so a big screen might not be necessary. Fans of Ronda Rousey will be disappointed. Fans of Iko Uwais will enjoy at least one of his scenes, but probably be disappointed. Lauren Cohen and Mark Wahlberg gave enjoyable performances but this movie hasn't convinced me that either are particularly special action stars. As for the statement about this film heralding "the new wave of combat cinema", I can see that being true only in the sense that the creators went into this intending to create a flood of sequels and a TV show regardless of how well this film performs.
I'm interested enough in the James Silva character and where the story left off that I expect I'll want to watch the sequel. I will be waiting for that to hit cheap theaters, though, as I doubt it would be worth the full price of admission.
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[HIGHLIGHT]Why did they do that? Minor nitpicks about character actions that partially broke my suspension of disbelief.
During the opening raid, the agents conducting the raid fail to notice several hidden, dangerous, fail-safes the people they are raiding had set up. As a team, they move from room to room subduing people at gunpoint, moving them to sit facing a wall in one room so that these people can be guarded by a single agent. It bothered me, at the time, that the agents never tried to physically restrain these individuals, but I understand now that attempting to do so could have opened themselves up to attack, that they never had any intention of apprehending these individuals, and that such action would take time and attention away from their greater goals.
A crucial moment in the initial car & motorcycle chase involves all of the computers in Bishop's technical support team being interrupted, the screens going dark at an important time. After the computers come back online, Bishop orders the team to review the footage from the few seconds they were dark and the team discovers a motorcyclist had planted a bomb on one of the field team's vehicles. How did they not see that the suspension of service was so conveniently timed and why did they not then start suspecting that their computer system and communications might be compromised? As the other events of the film took place, why is it that no-one seemed to piece together that suspicion and take action?
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[HIGHLIGHT]For those of you who have watched this film, I'm curious to have a few questions answered.
What exactly were the motivations and allegiances of Li Noor, of the government leader controlling everything from the communications plane that was hijacking the Overwatch team's communications, of the agents who infiltrated the embassy, and of the VIP who had the most verbal and violent confrontations with Silva? They all could be assumed to be working together in harmony, but then there's the reveal that Li Noor and the people in the communications plane are Russians, seemingly distinctly separate from the majority of the ground forces we see in opposition to Silva. Even if they're all related and connected and united in purpose, you still have to wonder if the convoluted plan they put in motion was really the best way to achieve it. Connected to this question I need to lay out my understanding of things and ask additional questions:
Alice Kerr confirms that Li Noor is her source, the one who fed her the intel that led to the semi-botched raid that the protagonists believed to have been a failure. We learn that the team collected fake paintings from the house, believed they might have been used to transport the missing explosive, but failed to find the explosive material within. We later learn, through Li Noor providing additional information, that the people looking over the paintings didn't do a good enough job and that the explosive chemicals were indeed contained within the paintings.
I get that the death of the Russian(s) in the initial raid was presented as what incited the lady in the plane to launch the kill-Overwatch operation. But, like, if Li Noor was her ally all along, why did he provide Overwatch the intel that led them to raid that place in the first place, knowing that it risked sacrificing those people and resources? If the Russians wanted to kill this team specifically, was allowing that initial raid and sacrifice just part of the long con? If it was part of their plan, why did the movie suggest that the death of that one boy was the real inciting incident?
I do get that the people in the plane wanted to take an action that would get their country noticed, and respected. An action that sends a message. Killing off an entire secret-USA-governmental team who frequently violate the borders of other countries, getting both their field agents and their tech support and command, certainly does send that message. I get that forcing their team to mobilize is one of the best ways to make them vulnerable to attack.
But, well, was it worth it? They kill a handful of people at the cost of, ultimately, quite a greater number of skilled soldiers and with a fair number of civilians killed by their supposedly half-hearted attacks and, otherwise, put in harm's way. Whether the civilians, the bulk of the opposing ground force, and the people in the communications plane were of the same nationality and same allegiance all still feels confusing. Also, what would have happened to their mission if Li Noor had caught a stray bullet? But, regardless of all this, was their plan worth it? Are there consequences to the plan's success, beyond these few American deaths, that I've missed?
For example, when Li Noor finally gave the Americans the code to unlock the harddrive he provided and they opened it, the filmmakers suggest that doing so revealed to the terrorists the location and identities of everyone within Overwatch. Did they actually gain even more than this? What if the Americans hadn't stupidly connected the harddrive to a computer that was connected to this kind of valuable information? If all they wanted was the destruction of this iteration of Overwatch, what did this accomplish when they could have theoretically just followed the source of the communications they were intercepting?
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[HIGHLIGHT]Finally, a couple more-trivial questions relating to the end of the film:
Why have Li Noor menace Silva at the end, only to not follow up with any action to attempt to kill Silva? Li basically gave himself away by taunting Silva with what was effectively, "say 'hi' to your dead mother for me - in hell!" but then Silva is left alone to continue living his life and maybe to rebuild Overwatch in the sequels.
Was there additional significance to the Li Noor's finger-tapping meditation? From the first scene that he does it, I assumed he was reciting a lengthly numerical code. He was under video observation for an extended period and I had hoped someone would have tried to see if it was a code while they were trying to break into the harddrive he gave them. Unfortunately, noone mentions it until the very end of the movie and nothing of significance is given as a reply.[/HIGHLIGHT]
This method of displaying spoiler text should keep the vast majority of people viewing this thread safe from reading spoilers. I've tested it across all skins, including mobile, and it has resonable effectiveness. Interestingly, embedding it within quote tags seems to prevent people from seeing the text even by quoting me, as this forum seems to disallow nested quotes and just removes anything within them from your reply.
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