God, this is still just as **aggressively** "meh" 20 years later, despite the *great* things it had going for it in 2004; the CGI isn't impressive at all by modern standards, but Alan Tudyk as Sonny and Cromwell and Greenwood as [spoiler]the good guy/seemingly evil guy[/spoiler] duo *really* helped.

Man, Maddox was ***not*** lying when he wrote "this movie plugged 5 companies within a 10 minute block of time. That's roughly one advertisement every two minutes" back in 2004. And I forgot how young and innocent "actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf" was pre-Transformers; dude's barely a month older than me yet still looked four years younger than either of us in this role.

Man, both James Cromwell and Bruce Greenwood are/were some of *the* most versatile character actors; either could pull off being a villain like [spoiler]in L.A. Confidential and this movie or Below,[/spoiler] respectively, or the good guy like in Babe and the Star Trek reboot, respectively again.

Well, if it ain't my "favorite" action movie trope in action: internal injuries and brain damage after a massively traumatic accident just disappearing as soon as the tinnitus does; right of there with old FPS logic: your health regenerates itself as soon as the bleeding from your eyes stops. And then the hero can get tossed around like a rag doll while experiencing bone-breaking throws of 50 feet across the set. Oh, and look at that, Spooner was even labeled a "loose cannon" by other cops. Goddamn, I forgot how much of a lazy trope-fest this movie's script was.

Another trope all over the ending? The firearms amateur turning into a marksman under extremely deadly/stressful pressure. Look, Spoons' "aim and shoot" is pretty much the gist of it, but Dr. Calvin going from a laboratory psychologist who thought everything happening to her right now was impossible, to literally blindly firing a gun her first time, to turning into fucking Trinity from The Matrix in about 24 hours is absurd.

Yay, the heavy-handed message that was about as subtle as a brick through a window reached it's conclusion! /s

Also, what the hell happened to Bridget Moynahan? She was *the* Hollywood "it girl" for several years in the mid-aughts and then just vanished. Oh, looking over her IMDb credits since Lord of War pretty much answers that question; last high profile movies she were in were the first two John Wick movies as John's 'fridged dead wife. Sorry, Bridget, you weren't an aggressively terrible model-turned-actress,but you probably should've fired your agent after Lord of War did *nothing* to raise your star power.