The story: After getting out of jail, one brother (Bale) tries to look after his younger brother (Affleck) who is in debt and getting involved in an underground fighting ring run by violent drug dealers. When the younger brother goes missing, the older brother goes to find out what happened...
Was it good?
No. There's nothing wrong with the concept -- in fact, it sounded pretty cool to me when I first saw the previews for it. However, this is not an intense thriller. This is a slow, plodding, disconnected character piece with the trappings of a thriller. There's never any mystery and there are no interesting twists and turns. There really aren't any thrills -- what little conflict there is always has a feeling of a result that is inevitable. Now that alone doesn't mean it is bad. A slow character piece can still be fascinating, but there just isn't anything fascinating here. There's no depth, no conflict. It's a movie that seems to want to say something but ultimately seems to have nothing to say.
Now all this isn't to say the movie is all bad. The performances by Bale and Harrelson are solid. They just don't have much to do. Bale plays the tough but caring big brother. Harrelson plays the dangerous psycho. That's it. No exploration of character. There's also a bunch of other elements that never really pay off -- Bale going to jail, Bale losing the woman he loves, Bale losing his father. Maybe all that was supposed to push him to a point of desperation with his brother, but it seems like losing your brother is already enough to make you do anything to find him, so none of that really felt like it added anything.
In the end, while some of the performances were solid, there just wasn't enough here to overcome a sloppy, plodding screenplay and a lack of character depth or theme.
*** AVOID ***
