22 Bullets

I somewhat jumped the gun when I tweeted "22 Bullets is a solid 3.5 stars film" on Tuesday evening. It isn't. At best I'd award this fairly-mundane-but-glossy-in-the-same-way-all-French-films-appear-to-be film 3 stars. I'd been in the office between 9 and 7 and was then expected to make coherent conclusions about a 2 hour film? Dream on pal. The opening and closing sequences of the film, in all fairness, are worthy of 4 stars in themselves, and these are clearly what tricked my tired and sensitive-to-such-trickery brain into believing the distinctly average 75% of the film sandwiched between these sequences was also good. There's nothing necessarily bad about the rest of it, there's just very little which is actually commendable. Having said that, Jean Reno is extremely watchable for the enitrety of the film, and his son is possibly the most freaking cute kid I've seen in a film ever. This may be enough to distract you from the sheer mundanity of it all at the time of watching, but in the stark light of hindsight, you'll realise you've spent an hour and a half watching Jean Reno kill people in fairly unimaginative ways and some fairly unimaginative police-investigation scenes preceeded and followed by 10 minutes of awesomeness. I'm still deciding if these 20 minutes make it OK for me to recommend the film to you. You decide.
22 Bullets is released in cinemas on September 3rd.