Poor acting. I would say everyone in this film does some pretty bad acting except Luke Evans, but even his character had the stereotypical Brooklyn accent and solemn tone. Some cliché scenes like the AA meeting where someone speaks to the group, then guess who speaks next - Luke Evans. The son looks like he's 30 but plays a character that I think is supposed to be around 17. (His mom says he's "impressionable", so that makes me think teens.) In one scene Adam (Luke Evans) says to his son that he was his age when he committed a murder. We know he was in jail for 16 years, so that would put Adam at around 33 years old, however Luke Adams is 44, and to me he looks like he's in his 50s in this film.
The drug dealer uncle, sitting at his desk in an auto repair shop with a safe on the desk is pretty lame. All the dim lighting is cliché of the seedy drug underworld. The Jamaican accent of the female drug dealer isn't very good, not a genuine accent. I can never understand why casting can't cast actors with genuine accents, especially for accents that so many of us are familiar with.
The film takes a long time to get to the real story, it was probably in the last quarter of the film that I realized where it was going. I prefer to know in the first quarter what the film is about and let it unfold from there. I wanted to stop watching it many times but was too invested to stop so I let it play, probably skipped ahead a couple times.
The drug dealer uncle, sitting at his desk in an auto repair shop with a safe on the desk is pretty lame. All the dim lighting is cliché of the seedy drug underworld. The Jamaican accent of the female drug dealer isn't very good, not a genuine accent. I can never understand why casting can't cast actors with genuine accents, especially for accents that so many of us are familiar with.
The film takes a long time to get to the real story, it was probably in the last quarter of the film that I realized where it was going. I prefer to know in the first quarter what the film is about and let it unfold from there. I wanted to stop watching it many times but was too invested to stop so I let it play, probably skipped ahead a couple times.