Welcome to the Punch (2013)

The Age of Commercialism

Captivating movie !

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Writer & director Eran Creevy's "Welcome to the Punch" qualifies as an exciting, first-rate British crime thriller with James McAvoy, Mark Strong, and David Morrissey. McAvoy stars as a zealous London Detective Max Lewinsky who tangles with a master criminal Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong) who eludes him after a skillfully planned robbery involving Strong's gang. The four, masked thieves escape with their ill-gotten gains astride motorcycles with our tenacious hero in hot pursuit in his car. All of this occurs during the opening scene with McAvoy careening around London after the felons. At the same time, Max's superiors inform him that he must stand down. The resourceful McAvoy manages to isolate his nemesis from the rest of the gang. Meantime, he squares off against the villain who blows a hole in his right knee cap and leaves him behind. Detective (James McAvoy of "Wanted") has an operation on his knee that leaves it looking like a crocodile's back. He must draw fluid from his injured knee cap at intervals. The problem with Max's encounter with Sternwood is he confronted Sternwood without a firearm in his possession and against direct orders from the department. Ultimately, Max is left partially crippled with an obsessive desire to capture Sternwood, but at the same time his superiors think that he may have lost his edge. Fortunately, Max gets his opportunity three years later to prove himself again when Sternwood's son Ruan (Elyes Gabel of "Interstellar") is shot in the stomach and winds up in London. When the authorities arrest Ruan at the airport, he has just gotten off the phone with his notorious father in Iceland. Predictably, Jacob doesn't intend to let his son suffer any more than necessary, so he recruits an old colleague, Roy Edwards (Peter Mullen of "Shallow Grave") to help him after he returns to London to get his son. Meantime, Max hopes that Jacob will put himself at risk, re-enter England, and try to save Ruan. Predictably, Jacob doesn't disappoint Max, but along the way, Max discovers that the police force teems with corruption, specifically among his superiors, his immediate boss, bespectacled Nathan Bartnick (Daniel Mays) and worse of all top-cop Thomas Geiger (David Morrissey) who suspects Bartnick is dirty. Everybody except for his new partner, Sarah (Andrea Riseborough of "Oblivion"), is firmly on his side, and she is no slouch, until she meets her match in a thorough-going bastard, Dean Warns (Johnny Harris of "Atonement"), who describes himself at one point as "a good soldier, because of selfless commitment." "Welcome to the Punch" is a gritty, realistic, but outlandish cops and robbers thriller. Creevy doesn't waste a solitary second in this thriller, and nobody delivers a bad performance. Moreover, Creevy has created a number of interesting characters, such as Sarah, who loves to write clues on her hand. Later, these words help our hero avenge her death.

I've just wasted 96 minutes of my life on this so I won't waste too much time on a review. This movie? Totally unbelievable rubbish. Not exciting, not suspenseful, not credible, wooden acting, predictable plot. Nothing new at all. It's a British movie that's trying to be an American shoot 'em up drama. The Americans make some wonderful movies but with an awful lot of duds thrown in, many of them of this tired old ilk. If I wanted to watch a thoroughly predictable and ridiculous good guys and bad guys movie of this type, it would probably be one of the better American ones. Seriously, don't waste your time and heartbeats on this crap. JMV

The story builds the characters' relationships and the connection between story details rather unbalanced and tends to be pretty fuzzy at the start. It doesn't even get any better after some time. It looks just like if the movie is depicting a few different character angles then puts them together at some time after the midway point. The later on revelations sure does explains it all. But I don't really think it clears the flaw created by the gaping hole in between story elements. The good things is that the movie offers quite nice action sequences having James McAvoy and Mark Strong being pitted against each other and then fighting together. The bad things about the action is that there's no daylight action, all of them are done at night, which doesn't give any color to the action as a whole. The acting is quite nice in overall. James McAvoy acted his parts well with great expressions. Mark Strong is really the great choice for the anti-hero character.

Part of my problem with "Welcome" might be that there are some British things going on here that I don't have the background to appreciate. I don't mean acting - MacAvoy and Strong and the rest of the cast play their roles wonderfully, and in fact it's been my experience that a Brit movie will almost always bring things to the screen that an American version of the same story wouldn't think of (or couldn't pull off). I don't know. Maybe I've just getting jaded or maybe I've seen too many movies since Walmart and Target routinely started selling their back-stock DVDs for $5 and made it easier for me to catch a lot more movies. But I like a movie to have a little more closure than I am getting here - it's like the movie needed a couple more scenes to wrap things up. Plus (*spoiler alert*)The most likable and sympathetic character in the movie gets bumped off 50 minutes in, and it seems gratuitous - it was obviously done to add the the grimness and heartlessness of the proceedings, which were already plenty grim and heartless.(*end spoiler*)I appreciate the terse, lean style on display here...but I am not in any hurry to see this again, and this isn't the kind of "you've got to see this" discovery you share with friends. I actually want to give this a "6.5", but because the acting and photography was so good, I rounded it up to "7".