Asher

Something like a Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese bookie with the hip coolness of a Jean-pierre melville noir.

There's too little action here for me to label it as an action movie. The "suspense" is mostly trying to figure out what the story is about, so I won't give any spoilers. Suffice to say that it's very slow paced, but I enjoyed watching it once only, considering how hard it is for me to find good movies these days.

I mainly watched it because of Framke Janssen who I liked in Taken, and Ron Perlman who I remembered from The Startup. It was good seeing both of them. Fortunately I kept my expectations low, so it worked out. I would have liked more action but the story was okay.

The review that said, "If the writing was better, it would have been a hit." That sums it up. Everything else about this was very good - sound, scenery, physical acting. It's all there, but it isn't

It was good to see such great performances from Ron Perlman and Famke Janssen, but Richard Dreyfuss was about as convincing as his fake accent. The directing was right on point, as was the score. But the writing from amateur Jay Zaretsky is what killed this film. This was only his 2nd (first being a short) writing attempt, and although the story premise in itself was decent, the screenplay was terrible. This film needed a seasoned screenwriter to edit/cut out and speed up the overly slow paced and too long 117 min length down to 80-90 mins, as well as fix some of the poor dialogue. Had this film been played at 1.2x faster speed, it may have held my attention better. The entire last 15-20 mins only needed to be 5 min. Great to see Ron Perlman back on the big screen, need to see more of him in these type of roles, and hopefully we will. It's a 7/10 from me - would have been 8 or 9/10 had the screenplay been edited down and tighter.

Watch Ron Pearlman drinks wine for 10 consecutive minutes you found the right movie.