Empire State

Suitable for late night television only. Too slow and too boring. Don't pay money to watch this. There's a lot of potential, though. The story is actually quite interesting and the acting is not half bad. However, the potential is never unleashed, unfortunately.

I gave up on this flick when I noticed that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was wearing a brand new, present day digital Casio G-Shock watch. He was wearing it throughout the entire movie, although the story is set in the eighties, more than 30 years ago!

This little flaw illustrates the ambitions of both the actor, the crew, the director and also the overall quality of the movie very well, in my opinion.

The story has a very nice and potential background as its base. But it turned out that the movie didn't really took advantage of this in the development and execution. The opening looks quite nice with the back and forth flow of the story, starting the story near the ending point, and the quick story buildup between the start and the conflict revelation. But then it plunges into mediocrity, and quite honestly boredom, since the movie decreased its speed significantly and let the drama and investigation set in more dominantly. The action also don't take long when they happen. Too much use of close up angles combined with the very quick camera movement with less shot accuracy takes precious split seconds at those sequences to refocus on what we are viewing.The acting seems just a standard job in overall. It's a bad surprise considering the potentials of Dwayne Johnson and Liam Hemsworth.

In the 80's, in New York, Chris Potamitis (Liam Hemsworth) had dreamed on joining the police academy but his best friend Eddie (Michael Angarano) destroyed his dreams being caught by the police with marijuana together with him. Chris is hired by the Empire State Company to work as security guard in an armored truck with the driver Tony (Michael Rispoli). When Tony is murdered in a heist and the Empire States does not pay the insurance to the widow, Chris decides to steal money from the depository to give to her. Chris comments with Eddie, who is a lowlife and bigmouth person, the fails in the security system of the Empire State and Eddie plots a scheme with another smalltime criminal to steal the money from the depositary. The FBI agents do not believe that two morons like Eddie and Chris could have planned the heist but the experienced Detective Ransome (Dwayne Johnson) follows his instincts to solve the case.

"Empire State" is movie apparently based on a true story with one of the most unpleasant and irritating characters of the cinema history, the loser Eddie. Consequently the performance of Michael Angarano is top- notch. On the other size, Chris Potamitis is shown as a naive and quite innocent victim of the heist but it is hard to believe in this character. Therefore, despite the good performances, the screenplay is badly written and waste the good cast. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

(Credit IMDb) A drama centered on two childhood friends who plan to rob an armored car depository, and the NYPD officer who stands in their way.

I've seen a lot worse when it comes to STD movies, but this just wasn't all that interesting in the whole scheme of things. For a true story, you would think more effort would be necessary. My main problem with Empire State is how bland it is. It doesn't have that much action what so ever, and it lacks the emotional punch needed for a film of this magnitude, and the cast just simply isn't up for the challenge. I garnered no emotional stimulus between Chris (Liam Hemsworth) & Michael Angarano (Eddie) because not only did the film not make me care about their fates, but their performances were rather poor. Liam Hemsworth is not lead material, and made for a very boring lead. He also felt miscast, and forced in the lead role. Michael Angarano isn't much better. He grated my nerves with his wise-ass character, and I felt like smacking that smug look off his face. His chemistry with Hemsworth was off as well. Dwayne Johnson is criminally wasted in this movie as a detective. Whenever he appeared on screen, my interest level was raised significantly, but that was much too seldom for my liking. He was far too good to have such a small part in this movie. Emma Roberts is barely in this movie, aside from a few pointless scenes. We get scattered clips in the beginning and the end of the real life events that took place, but it didn't matter much to me.

Final Thoughts: A rather mundane account of a true story. I'm not gonna tell you to avoid it, but don't expect riveting entertainment. It's not a very good movie, and it went straight to DVD for a reason.

4/10.

To be honest the majority of this movie is the two main characters cussing and fighting. While it's cool that the plot is based on a true story, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The acting is okay, but the characters are annoying. The plot itself, wanders around a lot and doesn't seem to have a clear direction. Then the movie just kind of ends.