Dead Man Down

The first three months of the year are clearly turning into movie studio’s dumping grounds for movies that they have no idea what to do with. 99% of movies released within this time frame should probably have been released straight to DVD but you need to put something in the theaters. Dead Man Down happens to have fallen into the category of being a “dump movie”. It looks like no one knew what to do with this movie.

Dead Man Down follows the revenge driven lives of Victor (Colin Farrell) and Beatrice (Noomi Repace). Victor is seeking to kill his boss, Alphonse (Terrance Howard) that ruined his once happy life Beatrice seeks retribution for being permanently scarred in a car crash. They are each looking to become whole again and their journeys inevitably collide with explosive and deadly results.  

Colin Farrell and Noomi Repace are the lynchpins of the entire movie, without their performances it would turn into a horrible mess. I am so pumped that Farrell has finally decided to start trying over the past few years, after seeing him I such debacles as Pride and Glory and Miami Vice. Repace is excellent as usual and continues to prove that she can be a major force in Hollywood for the foreseeable future. I also wanted to say that no matter how ugly they tried to make her look in the movie, she still came out looking sexy.

The action scenes are pretty intense and realistic which is always a great thing. I loved the fact that Farrell wasn't portrayed as a one man army, and he needed to be planning ahead of his targets to even have a chance of being successful.  Niels Oplev proved that his success as a director was not only limited to the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It is going to be interesting to see what he will be able to do with a well written script in the future.

As good as the two leading performances in this movie were, the secondary performances were incredibly weak and poorly written. Terrance Howard was there to get a check and he never seemed like he was fully invested in his character, he came off a bit wooden in every scene that he was in. Dominic Cooper shows up and plays a “cartoonish” up and coming gangster, whose storyline was flat from the very beginning of the movie.

The screenwriter of this movie must have gone to the George Lucas School for Dialogue because it was on about the same level as the Star Wars prequels. Repace and Farrell did a great job with what they were given but the other actors didn’t step their game up to compensate for the shit quality of the dialogue. With a better screenplay, this movie could have been very good, but it ended up getting dumped in an early March release date against Oz the Great & Powerful.

This is an above average revenge movie that got very good performances from its two lead actors. Check it out if you are looking for a more adult oriented movie as opposed to the new Oz movie that just released from Disney.