The Specialist

As a fan of 'the transporter', I looked forward to this, because it's 'the courier'...which means basically the same. Only this time, not so much with cars. The movie started out great, getting to know the courier and his type of work, just finishing a job. He is then forced into his next job, which is a bit out of his comfort zone - making an unknown delivery to an unfindable crime lord - played by Mickey Rourke! The premise allowed for so much, I was genuinely excited by now - but I soon got disappointed. As a whole, the delivered briefcase, the job, and the impossible plot made no sense. All the obligatory elements in the movie viewed apart - the sidekicks, the stolen airplane, the torture, the assassins, the bugged apartments, the murders, the arrests, anagrams, and much more... - had a feel of pointlessness and irrelevance to it, as if someone just grabbed some spy story ingredients and threw them together. Our courier stumbles through his unlikely adventure to complete his job and gets, true to the movie, an ironic surprise ending that made no sense. A total let-down.

A Courier (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is tasked with delivering a package to a crime boss (Mickey Rourke) thought to be dead. Hilarity ensues.

"Yeah, I Watched This Movie". That's the attitude I had when "The Courier" reached its conclusion. We have seen this type of movie before, often, and we have had more fun at the expense of a larger budget. But like so many other movies nowadays, we feel a bit let-down when the screen goes black.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, an exceptional actor who never seems to be the right fit for his character, does the best he can with what he has. His character wakes up in a crummy apartment infested with mice. He uses superglue to fix a nasty cut. Yet despite all this self-loathing, he has good friends and family that he cares about. What's with that?

The female lead is bizarre. Her hairstyle makes it appear as if her follicles are desperate to escape from her scalp, and considering how bad it is, I can't blame it for trying. She also has an unnecessary dubbing-over occasionally when she speaks. Perhaps they shot the film and forgot to record her at places.

Mickey Rourke and Til Schweiger, the other draws on the cover, are under and wrongly used. Rourke's head is only visible for the first half of his scenes, the latter's introduction is corny. Schweiger's bodyguard hasn't ever seemed to have used a fire arm before, let alone in a movie.

An odd assortment of has-beens and ne'er-do-wells fill out the rest of the cast. Lily Taylor and Miguel Ferrer play a Team Rocket type pair of villains who never say much besides grunts and gunshots. Mark Margolis, the definitive "that guy!" of actors plays Morgan's dad, or something. I'll give you one guess as to his fate.

"Yeah, I Watched That Movie." That is what I will say to people when they ask if I have seen "The Courier". And it might take me a minute to remember exactly what they are talking about.

... you can't be bothered to write a review. This is one of those films.

and now I have to fill out 10 lines of text for the minimum review length. Sometimes I sort of wish I never started doing something, so I guess in a way writing this review is very much like The Courier, essentially pointless and a complete waste of my time and not even getting to the level of 'so bad it's good'. It's actually amazing that I've managed to write this much to be honest, I only finished watching The Courier 10 minutes ago and it's already slipping out of my brain to the extent that I'm not entirely sure what actually happened at the end anymore (the first half has gone already). Normally this would be good as valuable brain space isn't being taken up by The Courier but I expect by the end of the day all memory of this very forgettable film will be erased from my memory which leaves the very real possibility that one day in the future I might see it's title when I'm looking for some rubbish action film to watch and actually waste my time by watching it again with a nagging sense of déjà vu and I won't be sure if it's because I've watched the courier before or that it's just generic rubbish.

So that's 10 lines of text done (in fact more than 10 lines which is a lot more than The Courier deserves) so I'm going to do something more interesting than watching The Courier such as watching paint dry or sitting in a dark empty room.

Never heard of this movie before? Well, keep it that way! There is absolutely nothing worth seeing about this movie, that is basically being just a very standard modern action flick, with a poor story but even worse storytelling.

Quite weird and surprising to learn that this movie got directed by Hany Abu-Assad, who definitely has class and skills in him and is mostly known for directing smaller type of movies, with a strong message in them. Most definitely not dumb action flicks such as this one!

I can see what kind of approach they were going for but they obviously failed with it. They tried to create a smaller and more realistic type of action movie but the story and its characters really aren't suited for that. I actually believe I might had liked this movie better, had it been done as a silly and over-the-top action-flick, in a more '80's type of style.

The movie has a very simple concept but it makes things needlessly difficult. Because of this you will start to loose interest in it all pretty fast and after a while you simply have no idea what is going on anymore, simply because you just don't care about anything that is happening. The storytelling really makes this a far from pleasant movie to follow. Just imaging a Chuck Norris flick, with all of its clichés, getting told as a serious movie. That should give you an idea of how this movie is like.

Those who are looking for a movie with plenty of action to enjoy will also end up feeling disappointed by this movie. This movie feels like such an extremely low-budget one and things don't get any more exciting than a couple of poorly filmed gunfights. Certainly nothing spectacular, surprising or exciting about this movie.

Just forget about it!

4/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

OK this film isn't bad.

The first reason why it's disappointing it's because - just like Black Death (2010) - it tries to "keep it real" way too much .. films need escapism, to a point, and here it almost seems that they decided to go full speed for the not-Hollywood look.

Now i'm not one to defend Hollywood, but what kills this film is that the direction is poor; it fails to capitalise on the realism, instead giving me a film that looks like an amateur production. Some of the shots are truly amateurish, and often the camera-work fails to make a scene interesting.

Having said that, The Courier isn't half bad, there are plenty things i liked in it, from the fight moves to the casting (the lead is a bit wooden, the girl fits the part OK~ish, the detective is perfect), and the whole production is pretty decent.

I also don't subscribe to the whole "it's full of cliché'" thing; if anything, it tries to avoid clichés in a film genre where everything has already been done.

All in all, i can say that it's an interesting film to watch, even though i get the feeling the director has a background in TV - seriously, you (whomever you are) truly murdered what could have been an interesting flick.

So, after all considerations, i give The Courier a decent 6/10 - better than MI3, and no Tom Cruise.