Had I known Dead Man Down were a WWE Studios production, I would not have put off seeing it. The fake-wrassling empire’s movies can be loads of fun — that is, when they don’t take themselves too seriously. This one takes itself too seriously.
Set in the chunk-strewn melting pot of New York City, the glossy thriller unspools as a twisted romance of sorts between Hungarian engineer Victor (Colin Farrell, Seven Psychopaths) and French beautician Beatrice (Noomi Rapace, Prometheus). They’re cross-the-way apartment neighbors, each of whom thirsts for personal revenge. He’s been working undercover in the criminal enterprise (led by Prisoners‘ Terrence Howard) that killed his wife and daughter two years prior, and it’s only a matter of time before his co-workers figure out his true identity.
Meanwhile, Beatrice isn’t above blackmailing Victor to kill the drunk driver who served only three weeks’ time for an collision that left her face a map of scars. As befitting a Hollywood film with $30 million behind it, Rapace still looks beautiful with her character’s “disfigurement,” one that makes her a target of neighborhood kids who throw rocks at her and scream, “Monster!” Frankenstein, she is not. Also in true Tinseltown fashion, the opening set piece is one of those slow-motion shoot-outs in which gunfire is exchanged amid a downpour of Benjamins.
Overlong by half an hour and burdened with a script (by The Mexican‘s J.H. Wyman) that doesn’t connect all its dots, Dead Man Down imperceptibly but surely wears down the viewer with its averageness. Reunited with Rapace after 2009’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Danish director Niels Arden Oplev makes a bid for American success, only to be suffocated by the system’s needless excess. At least he did his job by making it look slick. —Rod Lott