A bad movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting much from this flick but since it was starring Nicolas Cage, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, unfortunately, as expected, it turned out to be another dreadful direct-to-VOD action flick. Indeed, it had all the typical trademarks of the genre such as some ugly yellow filters through the whole duration. It was also directed by Steven C. Miller, possibly one of the worst directors ever and you had Lydia Hull playing (very badly) a minor role (Seriously, I can’t believe that I have seen already a dozen movies starring this girl, always in this dreadful genre). Above all, I thought this movie was just a huge mess, even more than usual. I mean, at some point, you see the two main characters when they were kids going home and there is an unidentified woman and man sitting there in the living room. Later on, the man did shoot himself but what happened to the woman? Then, you get to see these kids going to the arcade without ever acknowledging what happened before and, there, somehow, completely randomly, the older boy meets some kingpin played by Nicolas Cage. And it went on and on like this with an endless succession of some very clunky scenes poorly together one after the other. Another funny thing was to compare John Cusack who barely acted at all and Nicolas Cage who was acting too much but, even if it didn’t really work, Cage at least did try to do something with his character. The weird thing is that the concept actually had some potential. Indeed, I could imagine a gritty drama focusing on these two boys growing up in some very toxic environment. On one hand, you would have the big brother always covering and protecting his young brother who would then become successful while the big brother would get completely sucked in this dark underworld becoming a major f*ck-up in the process. Unfortunately, the makers apparently didn’t really care at all about what they were actually doing and the end-result was pretty dreadful so you should definitely avoid it.