Jean-Louis Gosselin

First thing’s first: Steve McQueen has a very rare talent. Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave were phenomenal. He is, first and foremost, an intellectual, an artist capable of creating thought-provoking scenes and sceneries of unforgettable majestic beauty. Now for the hard part: Steve McQueen ain’t Michael Mann. Rarely have I thought to myself: “oh dear, this is going to be a LONG two hours” - only 8.5 seconds into a movie. The opening shootout (with half a dozen thugs firing away at close range, spraying bullets as far as Alaska yet only managing to injure ONE of Liam Neeson’s crew - in the tummy, poor lad - with the bullet-riddled getaway van’s backdoor on the other hand hanging by a thread...) all leading to *that* clunky, laughable, unrealistic police car flip (I mean: really, Mr McQueen...?) tragically set the tone for what was to follow: a story line as thin as dental floss and casting so bad you actually wondered if Steve McQueen *was* truly at the controls of this slowmotionized faceplant (I don’t care what people think of Viola Davis: her acting was dull at best, unnoticeable at worst). There is no point talking about the silliness of the so-called ‘climactic’ heist scene (which - discarding Zimmer’s tired and totally pointless soundtrack - could only be described as some very weird home invasion at 8:14pm on a Tuesday evening by three very weird individuals whose costumes and voice-changing equipment were a mix between Star Wars and a class-D ninja movie shot in some 1980’s film studio in Donaldson, Minnesota), nor is there any point in ranting and raving about the neon-lit metaphysical signposts on racial tensions, women’s rights and financial inequality in America (yawn) which annoyingly got in the way of a movie already set to collapse under the weight of its own ineptitude. The truth of the matter is: this is a flop. A massive, snore-inducing flop. We all trust Steve McQueen to swiftly bounce back from this atrocious slip-up (utterly forgivable, as we clearly sensed this production to be nothing other than an obsessive adolescent dream of his of one day directing his very own cops & robbers movie without ever having learned a lesson or two in social realism from watching Mann’s “Heat”...) and we all look forward to seeing his true intellectual imprint on his next venture (right after he’s sacked that poor useless screenwriter he hired for Widows). Note to self: the fact that the Guardian gave 5 stars out of 5 (let me repeat that for you: 5 stars out of 5) for this sorry excuse of a bad joke of a movie can only lead me (us) to remember that: whatever the Guardian disparages is definitely worth watching, and whatever the Guardian hails as a masterpiece is definitely worth binning!