If I had to hazard a guess as to what director/writer Carnahan was going for with this movie, I'd have to go with "Elmore Leonard meets Reservoir Dogs and Guy Ritchie, only with a bigger cast of characters." Potential viewers should adjust their expectations accordingly, and PC soccer moms should stay away entirely.
There were individual scenes and individual snippets of dialog and screen action and camera shots that I thought were really snappy and well done here. Ben Affleck reminded me why I liked him in the first place in his minor part; Ryan Reynolds gave a very impressive (if somewhat one dimensional) performance; Ray Liotta was his usual compelling self; and there are numerous supporting actors playing funny and quirky and "interesting" hipster outlaw characters...and yet the whole thing just did not come together.
The real problem, for me, is that the screenplay starts out as something of an outlaw comedy, but suddenly turns bloody and grim and gruesome and then ends up glum and fatalistic and depressing (with the exception of a wonderful "kiss off" scene between the surviving bail bondsman/bounty hunter and the remaining Tremor brother). I'm not sure why Carnahan decided to end the story on the note he did. It seems to me that if you're going to do cheerful black hearted nihilism for 2/3rds of a film, you have no business switching moods to sincerity and outrage 10 minutes from the end.
The plot is, of course, pandemonium, with a dozen aggressively hip characters bouncing off each other like cats in a laundry sack, and the back story is so twisted and convoluted that it hardly seems worth the eventual payoff. To give the screenplay fair credit, though, it does play fair with the audience and I guessed the movie's big "twist" ending far in advance based on clues planted early on. So there's a plus and a minus there.
I started out thinking I might buy this DVD for the first 30 minutes, (I'm a sucker for well done caper films) but decided by the end that I might keep a copy in my collection if someone gave one to me...or maybe not. It was worth watching once, anyway.
There were individual scenes and individual snippets of dialog and screen action and camera shots that I thought were really snappy and well done here. Ben Affleck reminded me why I liked him in the first place in his minor part; Ryan Reynolds gave a very impressive (if somewhat one dimensional) performance; Ray Liotta was his usual compelling self; and there are numerous supporting actors playing funny and quirky and "interesting" hipster outlaw characters...and yet the whole thing just did not come together.
The real problem, for me, is that the screenplay starts out as something of an outlaw comedy, but suddenly turns bloody and grim and gruesome and then ends up glum and fatalistic and depressing (with the exception of a wonderful "kiss off" scene between the surviving bail bondsman/bounty hunter and the remaining Tremor brother). I'm not sure why Carnahan decided to end the story on the note he did. It seems to me that if you're going to do cheerful black hearted nihilism for 2/3rds of a film, you have no business switching moods to sincerity and outrage 10 minutes from the end.
The plot is, of course, pandemonium, with a dozen aggressively hip characters bouncing off each other like cats in a laundry sack, and the back story is so twisted and convoluted that it hardly seems worth the eventual payoff. To give the screenplay fair credit, though, it does play fair with the audience and I guessed the movie's big "twist" ending far in advance based on clues planted early on. So there's a plus and a minus there.
I started out thinking I might buy this DVD for the first 30 minutes, (I'm a sucker for well done caper films) but decided by the end that I might keep a copy in my collection if someone gave one to me...or maybe not. It was worth watching once, anyway.