We realized about 10 minutes in that the movie is just not good — the acting is okay (Bale is good, especially given what he has to work with; everyone else is putting in a heroic effort even if it’s not paying off, especially Freddy Rodriguez, whose acting here might best be described as “not going down without a fight”), but the writing is just a mess. Characters don’t have throughlines; they change depending on the scene, on what reaction the screenwriter wanted to explore or what line of (risible) dialogue he felt he just had to use, so on top of people just really not talking like this — people don’t append “dawg” to every sentence; people in relationships do not speak to each other this way — you can’t look past the contrivance to care about the characters anyway, because they…aren’t characters. They’re reflex machines. Most frustrating of all is the fact that the movie has the seeds of something better in it; there are a few black-comedy bits that work, and if it had been rewritten more consistently and with an eye for the grand gesture, it might have gotten by with some of the lazier set-ups. But it wasn’t, so it doesn’t. (11/7/06)

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