This was always going to age like milk. It’s very much in love with its edgy take on James Bond, and with a director like Rob Cohen at the helm, the end results feel unsurprisingly meatheaded and juvenile. The story and characters are disposable and cliché, which is fine for what it’s trying to do. However, there’s no charm to any of the acting or dialogue, which I’d argue is pretty important if you want to make this kind of movie work. Instead, what we get is a lot try-hard cringe that feels like it’s really aiming for the early 2000s douchebag demographic. Visually it looks gross and pornographic, there’s a lot of agressive imagery that wouldn’t look out of place in some nu-metal music video from around the time. There are some really cool needle drops (like, there’s no way you’d get a Rammstein or Queens of the Stone Age song in a big movie today), but for every good one there are twice as many that feels like a Hot Topic manager screaming “plz think I’m cool”. There’s also some nice practical stuntwork, but every action sequence suffers from being overedited and going on for too long (as does the movie as a whole). All in all, you’re not missing out on anything by skipping this.

2/10

Vin Diesel is actually quite good in this as an adventurer who manages, frequently, to wind up US law enforcement by causing mischief and mayhem against those he thinks deserving of exposure. When NSA agent "Gibbons" (Samuel L. Jackson) arranges for him and his team to be dumped in the Czech Republic they have a choice - infiltrate a ruthless gang of Russian hoodlums bent on world domination or... go to jail. Initially, the team think it's all an hoax but as it becomes clear that they actually are in a real scenario it all starts to heat up. Diesel has bags of charisma, attitude and muscle on screen, for this. Sure, it's not new nor will the writing and dialogue cause you to need a dictionary (unless you are about seven years old) but as action films go, it is perfectly watchable with plenty of car chases, pyrotechnics and gadgets