"I am dismayed. I have no prejudice against violence when I find it in a well-made film. But this film is almost brutally cynical in its approach. The Welsh director, Gareth Evans, knows there's a fanboy audience for his formula, in which special effects amp up the mayhem in senseless carnage. There's obviously an audience for the film, probably a large one. They are content, even eager, to sit in a theater and watch one action figure after another pound and blast one another to death. They require no dialogue, no plot, no characters, no humanity. Have you noticed how cats and dogs will look at a TV screen on which there are things jumping around? It is to that level of the brain's reptilian complex that the film appeals." (Roger Ebert)But is it boring? Hell No. (*Roger Ebert is
a boring old biddy!)
"'Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang' is made for a fairly specific audience; it helps if you are familiar with the private eye genre in general and the works of Raymond Chandler in particular (the movie has five chapter headings, all taken from Chandler's titles). But do the titles come from Harry Lockhart, or do they exist outside his mind and suggest that Shane Black's screenplay has another level of comment on top? That would be roughly like the subtitles in 'Domino,' which have a different point of view than the narration." (Roger Ebert)But is it boring? No.
"In the tradition of multinational European auteurism, 'Valhalla' puts a Sergio Leone hero in a Werner Herzog landscape, filmed in Scotland, with mostly British actors playing bands of Nordic warriors. The Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, star of Mr. Refn’s 'Pusher' trilogy of crime films, does his best Clint Eastwood as One Eye, a scarred, silent pagan killing machine who has blood-red visions of the future." (NY Times)But is it boring? Yes. Holy shit, yes.
"Vincent Cassel is the overwhelming fact of both films. He doesn't give Mesrine great depth, because how can he? The man was a psychopath, immune to movie psychology. But he gives him great presence. He is brutal, ugly, powerful and inscrutable. In other roles he's none of those things; he looks nice when he smiles. But he finds such cold ferocity in Mesrine that he's like a wild animal who kills for survival. I don't think Mesrine likes killing. He just frequently has to." (Roger Ebert)But is it boring? Yes.
"The build-up to this slaying forms the opening scene to Jean-François Richet's terrific film, though the sequence is presented in a tricksy split-screen manner, misleadingly hinting that the film will be in the wacky Anglo-Saxon style of The Italian Job or The Thomas Crown Affair. Instead, Mesrine is in the tradition of Jules Dassin's Rififi or Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge: muscular, forthright storytelling, hard-smoking, hard-drinking action, horribly incorrect attitudes, brutality with a top-note of self-loathing, bushy moustaches and a cracking lead performance from Vincent Cassel as Mesrine." (The Guardian)But is it boring? No.
