Thrill-seeking criminals perform a series of daredevil stunts to steal money and gems, only to give it away to the poor and less fortunate. Training for a job with the FBI, young recruit Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) suspects that only extreme athletes could pull off these heists. Utilizing his own special skills, Utah infiltrates the gang of thieves after befriending their charismatic leader, Bodhi (Edgar Ramirez). As Johnny experiences the rush of their lifestyle, his superiors fear that his loyalties are being tested.
Remakes are okay but I just find it weird when there already is a remake of a film that was originally released after I was born (I was technically 1 but that’s not the point). Even so, I’ve never seen the original film in which this is based so my opinion will be based on that so I cannot speak to how this compares to the original. The story for this film is when a group of daredevil criminals performed a series of robberies, a young FBI recruit named Johnny Utah (Bracey) suspects that these criminals may be extreme athletes like himself. Using these skills, Utah infiltrates the gang and befriends their leader known as Bodhi (Ramirez). Johnny’s superiors soon become worried that he may become too entrenched in their lifestyle. So most of the people in this film are extreme athletes and the film almost goes out of its way to show this as there are many scenes involving people participating in these sports. I thought these scenes were well done and were exciting to watch. I found it hard to tell what was actually real and what was CGI although there was some but this is a good thing. I will say that I saw the film in 3D and this did help the film during these scenes as they emphasized the scope of what they were doing and the danger these activities presented. I thought there were a lot of these scenes, perhaps too many, and I found they took away from other elements of the film. I did explain the story earlier on but I found there wasn’t much else here besides that. The only other things presents are just shoe-horned, predictable subplots which didn’t add but also didn’t take away from the experience. This is an action film after all and there was some action but I found it came a little too late for me as the film tended to weigh on more of the sports than the traditional action. The problem is that the extreme sports scenes created such an impression with me that the traditional action scenes just did not feel as good to me. Bracey’s Utah was okay but he didn’t really have much to work with here. He performed all the action scenes admirably but it was sometimes hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t. Ramirez’s Bodhi was also okay but I found him bland and not overly memorable. I guess his character’s layback demeanour made me not take him too seriously. Overall, this film will still provide under two hours of action and excitement which everything about it wasn’t good or great but just okay.
Score: 7/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
