Snitch

This was a good phase for The Rock, he'd done a few warm up movies and its before he became a characterisation of himself. The movie is entertaining, offering much more than the viewer may have expected :)

I'm sure there are good and effective movies about drug cartels, but I doubt this is one of them, and it's not particularly convincing. The problem is, there's no one to root against, or root for. In other words, the bad guys are nowhere near evil enough to hate, or even dislike, and the good guys don't seem to be in any real peril. This is just an uninspired and half-baked story in search of a movie. Filmmakers, put a "Death Wish" spin on it if you have to, but the results are less than satisfying. A couple of interesting action scenes are, of course, not even nearly enough to recommend it. ** out of ****

The part that I felt most vividly about was this dirty aspect of the law called Minimum Mandatory Sentencing. A kid receives a package from a friend, filled with MDMA pills and then is caught by the police. The law required that he either rat somebody out or serve a minimum of 10 years in jail. That pretty much is the end of life for an 18 year old kid. I wonder, what if Dwayne Johnson's character would have been a tough muscle guy with a lot of guns? Wouldn't he feel it "mandatory" to kill at least two prosecutors? The bottom line is that the movie had, beside the obvious thriller action bit, a deeper message about rigid laws that force, nothing more than the threats to your family that a gangster would use. I quite liked the film. The quality of it, though, was more like that of a TV movie. It must have been low budget, or at least it looked like that. Besides some of the names in the cast and the message I was talking about above, it was quite ordinary.

Had a couple of weeks off work and the weather was pretty bad so thought I'd catch up on a few films, watched half a dozen - this being the big surprise! This was one I thought would kill some time, but its actually very good. Good story, good characters that you actually root for. My only gripe is some of the characters were under-used. Agent Cooper, looked like a real interesting story but wasn't developed and The Rock's family kind of disappeared once the story was in place - especially his son, which was a shame because I felt the conflict between the situation and the effect it had on the family could've been shown more. Having pointed out the negatives, I have to say I highly recommend this film. There is action in the film, but it actually feels as though its there for story development rather than the sake of it. Could easily have been turned into a 90 minute action-fest, but thankfully that's not the case. Give it a go, it's well worth it.