This generically titled crime thriller revolves around standard-issue conflicts – warring drug lords, kidnapped loved ones, and so on – involving characters with names so generic they sound like they were generated by a screenwriting algorithm: Rick Calloway, Mike Breslin, Zoe Carter are just some of the dishwater-dull examples. But squint very hard and you might see a few imaginative or at least weird touches around the peripheries of the story, like little jocular Easter eggs snuck in by actors and editors working together.
For example Emile Hirsch, playing the aforementioned Rick Calloway, a facially tattooed master hacker from an old southern crime family led by paterfamilias Jack Calloway (John Cusack), plays the whole second half of the film as if he’s whacked up to the eyeballs on super-strong skunk. All his lines are delivered in an amused drone, and throughout the remainder of the film he looks like he’s waiting for all this shooting to stop so he can get a cheeseburger. That sort of goes with the fact that Cusack’s character seems to spend an inordinate amount of screen time grilling meat for his grandson while issuing orders to his lackeys.
