A simple plot: a hit-man accidentally kills a little girl and is then sent to put the mother out of her misery.
So, how can this possibly go wrong? After the explosive beginning, the pace drops off almost to the point of tedium as we're supposed to feel the agony of characters we never quite connect with. There's something about Triad bank accounts worth around $100 million thrown in to motivate the gangsters and throw some cops into the mix, but it's so poorly put together that - if it couldn't have been fixed via a couple of rewrites - really should have been taken out.
Fortunately, 40 minutes or so in, the action kicks off again and it's the excellence we all sat down to watch in the first place.
Now, I'm all for catering for genre fans, just as I'm all for making deep, meaningful thrillers, but unfortunately, the plotting doesn't quite have the plausibility or pacing to be the powerful action-thriller the director was hoping it would be and in the end, despite all the great action scenes, No Tears For the Dead left me feeling detached and out in the cold.
So, how can this possibly go wrong? After the explosive beginning, the pace drops off almost to the point of tedium as we're supposed to feel the agony of characters we never quite connect with. There's something about Triad bank accounts worth around $100 million thrown in to motivate the gangsters and throw some cops into the mix, but it's so poorly put together that - if it couldn't have been fixed via a couple of rewrites - really should have been taken out.
Fortunately, 40 minutes or so in, the action kicks off again and it's the excellence we all sat down to watch in the first place.
Now, I'm all for catering for genre fans, just as I'm all for making deep, meaningful thrillers, but unfortunately, the plotting doesn't quite have the plausibility or pacing to be the powerful action-thriller the director was hoping it would be and in the end, despite all the great action scenes, No Tears For the Dead left me feeling detached and out in the cold.