Seals the deal on Gavin Hood's irrelevance as a filmmaker. Back when Tsotsi came out I never bought into the hype, feeling it a pretty sloppy and stickily sentimental movie that seemed much more at home with bland feel good television than the indie social examination of African destitution it was being trumped up to be on the festival circuit and in the local art house.
In between that and this (something that is not exactly worse than Brett Ratner's excursion into the world of X-Men, but is, at least, a different kind of bad) he made some movie with Reese Witherspoon that a lot of people seem not to have liked. I guess I'm glad he didn't waste time revealing himself to be a bland shill with no more aspiration than collecting paychecks.
All one really needs to know about this movie is that it has not one, but TWO, scenes in which someone falls to their knees, looks up at a birds-eye camera angle and screams NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. The whole movie is a little like that. Lots of lazy, over the top melodrama with forced emotional cues.
The action sequences are, at least, coherent enough, if just as lazily conceived and executed. I guess now that this movie exists we can be glad it's over, though the new X-Men movie coming out in a couple months looks no better. I guess now that Bryan Singer has left it's time for me to stop believing this can be one of the few decent superhero franchises in the movie world.
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