211 (2018)

I've seen enough Nicolas Cage movies to know to expect absolutely nothing from them but I watched 211 anyway as it was advertised as a heist movie and I love heist movies.

A mercenary unit led by Tre (Ori Pfeffer) goes back to the United States to mastermind a bank robbery. Police officer Mike Chandler (Nicolas Cage) is on patrol with his partner and son-in-law, Steve MacAvoy (Dwayne Cameron), and a high school kid (Michael Rainey Jr.) forced to go on a police ride-along from his principal because of an altercation he had with some bullies. He happens to drive near the bank the mercenaries decided to rob and mayhem happens. 

I cannot tell you how much time it took me to write those few lines of plot as there's so much going on in this film and it is such a mess that it's hard to explain or even fully understand what is going on. That's one of the problems with 211's plot, it is too complex. To that, add the fact that it makes absolutely no sense, that has so many holes that if it was a ship it'd sink in less than a second, and it's tremendously tedious and unengaging. Not to mention the millions of subplots that feel very forced when they eventually intersect.

The writing is as dreadful character-wise too. The characters are paper-thin caricatures, a collection of clichés of the genre. What's worst though is that the writers tried to force some character development in this and it does not work. Some characters, the bank manager to mention one, are given pointless stories as they have no impact whatsoever on the plot. 

The acting is dreadful as well. Other than Nicolas Cage who kind of tries to do something with his pathetic role, the rest of the cast is so bad it's painful to watch. They are so bad they make Cage's performance look Oscar worthy. There wasn't much to be done here anyway with such a poor screenplay which, by the way, is filled with terrible dialogue. 

Momentus Pictures

In spite of that, the aspect of 211 that bothered me the most was the sound. There was something off when the actors spoke, I don't know what it was but it felt as if it was the result of a bad voiceover. Kinda like in The Room where the lines were re-recorded after the scenes were shot and then added. 

At last, there's the action. The sequences are dull, lifeless, and look really terrible.