Dallas Fisher

I think I got ripped off…

Affleck and Damon have been one of my favorite on screen duos over the past thirty years and honestly this movie is no different. I have no shame in saying that Ben Affleck is my spirit animal, which is why I’m so let down by this flick. I know I said I was let down, but it’s not because of their chemistry. Watching them work off of one other is once again a delight, even in a more serious vein. With Affleck’s work on The Town and Damon in the Bourne series, I was so excited for the potential of the both of them playing a law enforcement duo. Taking them out of Boston might have been the first inkling that things weren’t going to go the way I wanted.

I was all in at the start with the set up of the team and then things just never take a turn. As far as the team goes, well, Teyana Taylor might not be a good actor without the right director and Steven Yeun just doesn’t fit this type of movie, sorry buddy. I know I keep saying slightly positive things about aspects of this movie and then immediately say a negative thing, and I apologize for that. I‘m grasping at straws with this movie. It just never gets interesting. It has all the right parts. The two leads are great, Ben looks incredible with a gun in his hand, and there’s money and gun fights. Just none of those things reach a fully watchable or unique level.

I was scratching my head through most of it, as the writing is purposefully deceptive which is not fun when you don’t even get the time to be interested in what is happening. The act of trying to wrap my head around the situation was also such a drag that I was counting the minutes in my head. The tension is comparable to a CSI spinoff show where everything feels like a conflict of interest, and it’s pretty difficult to care about outcomes when the supposed antagonists are literally faceless. I continually asked myself, does anyone have it together?

I trusted in Matt and Ben and this just did not have the right cohesion of writing vs execution. Too much of the movie is characters counting money, I never could fully understand what anyone’s motivations were, and the reveals of what was really going on is counterproductive. Even the dramatic conclusions felt copy and paste from other films, but with less heart. Typically releases like this at least have one moment to remember, sadly this one does not. It looks fine, the acting is passable, but the overall product is nothing exciting or special.

RIP

4.7/10