It improves on the John Wick formula by taking itself way less seriously and not blue balling the viewer with too much schlocky worldbuilding. Patel’s directing is quite solid; I like how much of the character development is done visually, the visuals are always brewing with atmosphere and the final set piece is great. As a performer, I was completely sold on the physicality of it. He’s not afraid to turn the violence up to something that resembles _The Raid_, which I very much appreciate. Honestly I think you could have something great here if Patel overhauls his editing style next time around, because that aspect kneecaps this entire film for me. It’s like he wants to do something wild and bold, but overshoots in the process. Some of the early chase scenes are extremely overedited (the constant jump cuts and shaky cam don’t exactly help either), the pace loses all momentum during the boring second act, it’s got too many montages and flashbacks, he inserts real life footage to imply a layer of depth it never earns, the music choices are sometimes off; it’s a lot of bad choices piling onto each other. I also couldn’t really get into the villain, every time we cut back to that character we’re reminded of him being corrupt but there’s no real attempt at development. It’s just not a great film by any means, but I’d still love to see a sequel. Pulling a movie like this together as your debut feature is impressive, even with it being unrefined.


5/10