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