cinemajesty
Movie Review: "Redemption" (2013)I had a chance to catch this movie starring Jason Statham with a midnight screening on television. The actor carries the picture very well, but director/writer Steven Knight can hardly find a satisfactory balance for main character Joey, who comes to London heavy drinking to so-low down extraordinary physical capebilities as highly-skilled military machine man, traumatised from "Black Ops" in Afghanistan. Even fully-exposed playing, metallic-cross-wearing nun-turning-free-woman actress Agata Buzek as Cristina is not able to rescue the leading man from twisting, cheating, then misunderstood honest-kitchen-working, money-gathering, anonymous flat occupying duties, all alone to avenge his brutally-murdered girl-friend in unforgivingly lame shot of otherwise beautifully-textured exteriors of England's capital, when the showdown of title-giving state of existence goes overboard, while actor Jason Statham keeps face as capable action-moviestar. © 2018 Felix Alexander Dausend
(Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)
toddg-473-289818
Most of us watch Jason Statham movies because they are formulaic action flicks. REDEMPTION attempts to go beyond that, showcasing more of our protagonist's emotions than just calmness and stoicism, with the occasional outburst of physical violence. While there is nothing wrong with Statham's portrayal of a hard drinking, homeless ex-soldier with little to live for, the plot and script that surround him try to pull the audience in too many directions.First, Statham's character becomes a squatter in a posh London apartment, then he goes to work as muscle for Asian gangsters, then has a complicated and morally questionable relationship with a nun, all while trying to sober up, hunt down a man who is violent with prostitutes, and leave the daughter he never sees with a more favorable impression of him.The other peripheral parts of the movie add to the already long list of distractions - only lightly touching on human trafficking, and the occasional Orwellian drone shots from high above London. Statham needs a better script as an opportunity to showcase a greater range of emotions as an actor.
Chris Meh
First, the TL;DR version (questioning why you read reviews in the first place if you need that) The story of this movie was a cool one, Jason Statham is still a really good actor, but that's about it.To put things in perspective: I have always liked Stathams movies quite a bit. But if you expect action packed Transporter-esque movie you are wrong in this one. This movie has more of a tragic character evolvement associated with it. It's not so much about explosions and the violence that is contained in this movie is kept down to a minimum, yet is enough to accurately depict the protagonists situation. The story-line and everything was great. Up until the point at which the nun took a main role in the movie. She kinda pilled the entire experience down for me. Now this might just hold true for the German synch of this movie as I didn't find any English ones but from what I can tell I was, at no point, convinced by the weird character that is build around her, as well as her acting. She is that annoying character every movie has that you don't even wanna see die because you are so annoyed by it being on the screen. The movie in and of itself is solid, without her it would have been great.
lois-lane33
Many films I see these days are too close to being on the level of a boiling excrement experiment to even be called movies at all. This was a departure from that-it was a decent film. Good originality shines through making it a watchable deal without making you feel like your being exposed to something harmful to your health. Jason Statham films tend to be not bad-with the exception of Crank: High Voltage which I thought was a bad case of stoned screen writers. Not a lot to say about this one other than it was a good film-I don't want to give away the plot line as that would spoil it. The other day I was looking at some of the budgets for big films in general these days-many big films cost something like 100 million to make and then maybe make a return of 120 million. They are also generally films I don't like. This movie looks like it had a decent budget-but nothing over the top like many others-where filmmaking becomes a case of elitism wins the day-too bad there are not more films with 1-5 million dollar budgets that actually utilize good scripts and make money well above what they cost to make due to the fact they are intelligently executed as opposed to something that comes off like it was done by a rhesus monkey. Way too many films these days make a marginal return on a gargantuan investment. Some big budget films don't even make back their creation costs at the box office-but they keep making them anyway. It's not the way to go. See this film-you will probably like it.
AD
