After thirty seconds of exposition in which we're told our unlucky protagonist has been fatally poisoned and has less than an hour to live, he promptly trashes the room and starts running. Starts running and does not stop. Adrenaline is literally keeping him alive and so Jason Statham and the film itself charge headlong toward his target, keeping a frantic drug fueled pace in the hopes of returning the fatal favour before his time is up.
It's quite wonderful at first. Pretenses are dispensed with in favour of multiple barrels of fun. Right from the start it crashes non stop from scene to scene with a healthy mix of outlandish action, a little light body horror and well placed farce.
And then it all goes a little astray. You see, he has a girlfriend. This isn't bad in and of itself, indeed there are certain merits to the presence of Amy Smart in various states of undress, but her arrival in the film heralds a small swathe of action movie clichés and even worse, brings the pace crashing back to earth.
We discover that for love of her our hero is an Assassin On One Last Job, and he must protect her from the forces that surround him whilst keeping his dual life secret. Once she does discover the uncomfortable truth she does add a new, interesting and perhaps needed dynamic to the whole adrenalin run thing, but keeping the details of his day from her necessitates the film slow to a relative crawl, a gear change from which it never really recovers. It finds it's feet occasionally, but it changes from gloriously breakneck to sadly sporadic.
It's not a lethal blow, it's still solid and lively action fare, but I can't help but feel there was a magnificent idea that wasn't quite allowed to ripen. That it's forty minutes of gold weighed down by a further forty of slightly less precious metals.
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