All the political intrigue and excitement of a John Clancy novel and a great exploration of political corruption at the highest levels. I’ve always enjoyed Antoine Fuqua’s work…then again I’ve only seen Training Day and King Arthur, but they were both thoroughly enjoyable, as was this film. Aside from that, the film was very pretty, highlighting the beauties of…Canada. That’s right….they filmed most of it in Canada. At least that’s what I garner from the credits. The credits thank only the city of Philadelphia and from what I could see not many other places in America. So it makes me sad…because there were some really gorgeous shots in the film and I think it’s a darn shame that the cities it should have been shot in couldn’t out bid Canada.

While I’m not a Mark Wahlberg fanatic, I do enjoy his work and he does a very respectable job playing a guy who gets screwed by the no-name agencies he worked so hard for. And what was with Danny Glover? Has he had a stroke recently? He was slurring half of his dialogue and it was a little distracting. Well not nearly as distracting as the guy next to me chomping on popcorn or the guy in front of me stretching his arms way up and blocking half the screen. But hey, that’s what I get for sitting in the back of the theatre.

Something I noticed from the credits was that the aerial coordinator and the aerial ground coordinator were most likely related (they both had the last name North). See, ya learn things when you watch all the credits.

Oh…and it made me want to watch The Punisher (the 2004 one). Which was a little unfortunate because I forgot how many gripes I had with the movie. I mean the action stuff was all awesome, but I had huge grievances with the emotional nonsense they made him go through with Joan, Mr. Bumpo and Dave. And don’t get me started with the Russian. While that movie was…is a recreation of the Punisher character, those 4 were (I think) modern creations of Garth Ennis for the Punisher comics from the 90’s. So the fact that they were not accurately translated and misused in the film grieves me. Especially the Russian. He was supposed to be incredibly talkative, but Kevin Nash, while looking the part, is just there for muscle. So I’m going to take that clip of film, record myself acting lines of dialogue from the comic books and edit them in. Any objections?