One of the more polarising films I've seen talked about here, I was very keen to give it a watch, although my initial high hopes had been turned to caution by the bad stuff I had seen written about it.
In the beginning of the movie, I seen why. I thought I would be leaving another disappointing review and another hoodwinked viewer. It was slow, pretentious, directionless, and devoid of any meaningful exposition. Even the well done car chase failed to incite emotion. ****. Eventually though, roughly around the same time Jamie Foxx comes in to things, things begin to take a sharp rise. I guess you could say the movie shifted in to gear? Or not.
We start to get a plot, our main character becomes more human, the situations become more investing. After this the movie is very enjoyable. The humour begins to fire, the drama is more serious, the action way more engaging. I dunno if it was meant this way or not, a slow burn effect, but it happened exactly when it needed to to save the movie from being some sort of weird too clever by half film student nudge nudge wink wink experience. It became what the trailers made it out to be. The only let down after this was the very end scene, which did leave a bad taste in my mouth. Also, the soundtrack which was always going to be a big part of things was more single minded than what I was expecting. A lot of older more soul style music. I was hoping for a variety of genres like a Guardians of the Galaxy or Kingsmen. I'm probably biased towards use of music, (I consider Maximum Overdrive the best soundtrack ever) but I think it's best to use different styles unless there's a good story or character reasons to only stick a certain kind of sound, which I didn't think there was.
I liked it a lot and will be seeing it again, despite issues which force me to rate a little lower than what I wanted to.
7.5/10