21

Holy craps, this. movie. drags. It knows it drags and it taunts you with its dragging – rather than edit out wholly irrelevant scenes, it chooses to just film these irrelevant scenes in ... slow ... motion. I checked my watch at 45 minutes and wondered if I was going to start caring about anything about this movie – character, plot, scenery – any time soon. (Answer: No.) After an hour, I starting thinking about the other movies playing in the theatre complex and wondered if any of them started around then so I could walk out of this movie and into another. Any other movie. If 10,000 monkeys sat at 10,000 typewriters for 10,000 years, they could not have produced a movie that was more bland, more action-less, more devoid of personality in actors or more of a waste of two hours of my life (yes! It is a full two hours of “beige. I think I’ll paint the ceiling beige.”) that I will never get back. And did I mention that there's all this talk about facial recognition software so they have to wear disguises to fool the casinos ... and then they don't? Or the white characters do twice, but the Asian characters never do even once, even though security has figured out that the Asian chick is in cahoots with the white card counter. Somehow, though, that means the card counter has to fake his face and the white chick who hasn't been made yet has to be in disguise, but the Asian chick waltzes in san-disguise no worries? And it's the white disguised couple who is chased off, not the Asian chick they knew to look for? (I know. That's a plot hole, and you're saying "she said she doesn't care about plot holes" -- but what I actually said is I don't care about plot holes as long as I'm not checking my watch. And my watch got a work out in this movie) Okay, maybe Kevin Spacey was as delightful as ever. Rent the movie, and just fast forward every scene where you don't see Kevin. Then the movie will last maybe 15 to 20 minutes, and you can return it knowing you’ve experienced the only life this movie bothered to offer. Verdict: Secret Movie Rental (saved by Kevin Spacey from a Run Like the Wind verdict)