#that would've fucked Tim UP and it would have been awesome

[umbrellacam]

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[getmemymicroscope]

I don't think I've seen a Pierce Brosnan movie since his Bond days.

Wait, no. Just did an IMDb check. I've seen: The Long Way Down, The World's End, The Ghost Writer, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. And I think Mamma Mia (both of them) is on my 'to watch' list (as will be Black Adam, once it releases). And I did once consider watching The Foreigner, and even actually tried to watch The Thomas Crown Affair (I got bored), so maybe it hasn't been that long. Of course, I hadn't seen any of him before Bond either - and in fact, I didn't watch his Bond movies until just a couple years back (after I'd seen all the other movies with him, aside from The World's End). Okay, so that was a lot of words to say one simple thing: most of his movies haven't really been memorable to me.

Even Bond: GoldenEye is more memorable for the awesome N64 game, Die Another Day for an invisible car & stupid on-ice chase, The World is Not Enough for Denise RIchards' Dr. Christmas character, and Tomorrow Never Dies because Michelle Yeoh is fucking awesome in it.

And this one... I mean, it is undoubtedly a movie, with actors playing characters, and a plot of sorts, and good guys and bad guys, and action, and what I assume is supposed to be signs of failed romance, and what was written as comedy moments, and ... well, it just sort of happens in front of you without ever really coming together.

There's nothing new here - it's all predictable, because we've seen it all before. Criminals teaming up. Criminals that only steal from the evil. Pickpockets who constantly pick pockets and never get caught. Money-happy bad guy. Bad guy who runs his own prison. The very early twist of it being her daughter, and the almost immediately sequential twist of her being the one that had brought this idea together. Old guy hitting on younger girl. A heist of gold. Gold turned into something else to sneak it out, while something else is going on as a diversion (and the plan isn't told to us, so that we're also unaware of the impending "twist"). A chase scene designed as a diversion. The family member being like "I should've known he would do this" (aka, cheat them and run with the loot), right before *surprise* the person shows up having not cheated them at all. ... None of it, absolutely none of it, is anything new, and our characters aren't interesting enough (there just isn't enough time to get to know them that well) to make this any better than any of the many similar-such movies.

The twists they should've considered: Brosnan does actually cheat them and disappear; Tim Roth is somehow in on it and is a good guy (also not a novel idea, but would've been an interesting twist here, maybe).

I don't know. The entire thing just felt oddly meh, which is unfortunate because to some end I really did want to root for these characters. They just - there isn't much to it. They're also never really in any danger of anything bad happening, from the word go, so that lowers the stakes a bit as well.

It's a bit like Leverage, kinda, but thankfully Leverage is a multi-season show that let us get to know the characters and their quirks, whereas here they're forced to cram everything in together and it's clear the quirks they're using are not to help us learn about the characters but instead are just complete replacements for 'character development.'

Also, Pierce Brosnan's character is a creep and kinda a douche. On the plus side, I was afraid this would be kinda like Killer Anonymous in that they'd say 'hey we have Pierce Brosnan' and then just give him a 10-second cameo, like KA did with Gary Oldman & Jessica Alba, but they didn't do that - so at least that's a win, I guess. But that's about it, really.