It wants to be Drive--a character-driven thriller about a lone-wolf who gets emotionally involved with one of the subjects on a job--but an improbable, muddled script nixes that possibilility and the director compounds the problem because he doesn't know how to use moments to get us close to the characters.
The script is just an improbable mess. I could buy the premise that a guy helps people disappear from the mob, but, with the help of the mob because, obstensibly, they don't want to be too brutal? Uh, no. You hide from the mob, period.
But it gets worse. Mobster Number One (who routinely hires Mr. Disappear Guy, hereafter MDG) sends a hitman after the hitwoman he hired to kill Mobster Number Two because Mobster Number Two pays MDG to have her disappeared instead of just whacking her. (Such compassionate guys, these mobsters!) What's more, Mobster Number One is mad at MDG because he's working for his competition, and so MDG is fair game, too. Or something--it's hard to keep up with all these logic-defying twists. You see the problem here.
The director doesn't help things by rushing past every opportunity to slow the pace and get us close to his characters. The actors, for the most part, are up to the task, but they aren't given the opportunity, so when the big smoochy clinch arrives it seems to have been shoehorned in out of nowhere. Oh well.
So why did I give it a 10? To cancel a vote of one of yet another large group of knuckleheads who gave it a 1 (think paint drying) for reasons they would be hard-pressed to justify. No, it's not Drive, but it's watchable, if only to see Sean Patrick Flanery give his considerable acting chops an outing as the psycho hitman.
The script is just an improbable mess. I could buy the premise that a guy helps people disappear from the mob, but, with the help of the mob because, obstensibly, they don't want to be too brutal? Uh, no. You hide from the mob, period.
But it gets worse. Mobster Number One (who routinely hires Mr. Disappear Guy, hereafter MDG) sends a hitman after the hitwoman he hired to kill Mobster Number Two because Mobster Number Two pays MDG to have her disappeared instead of just whacking her. (Such compassionate guys, these mobsters!) What's more, Mobster Number One is mad at MDG because he's working for his competition, and so MDG is fair game, too. Or something--it's hard to keep up with all these logic-defying twists. You see the problem here.
The director doesn't help things by rushing past every opportunity to slow the pace and get us close to his characters. The actors, for the most part, are up to the task, but they aren't given the opportunity, so when the big smoochy clinch arrives it seems to have been shoehorned in out of nowhere. Oh well.
So why did I give it a 10? To cancel a vote of one of yet another large group of knuckleheads who gave it a 1 (think paint drying) for reasons they would be hard-pressed to justify. No, it's not Drive, but it's watchable, if only to see Sean Patrick Flanery give his considerable acting chops an outing as the psycho hitman.