An average movie

Obviously, I wasn't expecting much from this flick, in fact, all the people involved, Paul Schrader, Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin, even advised people to avoid it but I still ended up watching this movie. To be honest, it is rather difficult to judge the damned thing. I mean, it was apparently butchered by the producers in post-production and the end-result was indeed pretty lame. Basically, it was a really generic and boring spy tale with no pulse whatsoever. Still, there were a couple of red flags which made me wonder if it could have worked anyway. First of all, Nicolas Cage has become one of the most underwhelming actors at work nowadays and even though his character had some potential, Cage didn't really impress me at all here. Then, Anton Yelchin was even less convincing and even though I always had a weak spot for the young actor who died too soon, I'm afraid he was completely miscast here. Eventually, would the movie have been much better if Schrader would have released it the way he wanted to? To be honest, I doubt it. Apparently, a couple of years laters, he made his own cut but it hasn't been officially released, in fact, this other version is pretty much illegal, so I don't think I will ever have the opportunity to watch it. As far as I'm concerned, I think the whole thing was meant to be a B feature right from the beginning but, after the shooting was done, Schrader suddenly argued that it could be something completely different than what was the producers were expecting from the very beginning. Anyway, to conclude, with or without the drama around the making of this movie, the damned thing was pretty weak and I don't think it is really worth a look.

5/10