Joey (Jason Statham) is a vet with severe PTSD. He lives as a street urchin and knows the nun Cristina (Agata Buzek) from the soup kitchen. After getting beat up pretty bad, he stumbles upon some "luck." He cleans up his act and gets a job at a Chinese kitchen, where the owner discovers Joey can hurt people (never mind the two broken ribs he is nursing). Joey becomes their muscle. His character is a confused mess of being altruistic, vigilante, and bad man.He feels he must avenge the death of another street urchin, although her character and their relationship had about zero development. The action scenes are quick while there are long scenes of him having conversation with a nun, which seriously is not Statham's long suit. If you want to just watch the beat 'em up Statham, you can fast forward through 95% of the film.I am not sure why Statham decided to take on such a complex character, he doesn't pull it off too well. 3 stars is a stretch.Parental Guide: F-bomb, brief aural sex and nude pictures of men.

This is one of those movies that has stuck with me for a couple of days after watching it. A very different role for Jason Statham, and not what I was expecting from him, more dramatic. Here the choreographed fight sequences, bone breaking, car chasing action and general carnage take a back seat while Statham shows us a deeper and more emotional character. He pulls it off for the most part even managing to shed a tear.The movie isn't without its flaws though it flip-flops, is vague at times and even draggy but I was still invested throughout.I liked the story, a sort of modern day twist on Robin Hood following a damaged (and AWOL) special forces war veteran who has shut himself down with the aid of the bottle and is now one of the homeless on the streets of London. After getting beat up by some local thugs Joey Jones finds himself on the run and accidentally breaking (falling through the roof) into an apartment where the wealthy owner is away for the summer. Joey cleans himself up, borrows the mans clothes, his credit card, his car and sets about getting sober and fit again, eventually finding a job in a Chinese kitchen that requires some muscle.Jones then becomes a sort of vigilante in a bid to atone for his sins and also to find the girl he was playing hobo with on the streets who's been taken into a prostitution ring.We also see the building of a relationship with a faltering nun named Cristina (Agata Buzek) -she is fantastic and while this quasi romance does take over the story to a certain degree I enjoyed them together, great dialogue and interplay and just unique. 4/18/16

You know why I am giving this film one star? Because the creators of this film, in true Hollywood fashion, just can't help but show us yet another nun have a sexual affair. After Christina and Joey kiss, I thought the filmmakers might actually do something different, you know, like respect Christianity and show the characters come to their senses. But of course not, how silly of me. True devotion to Christ cannot ever, EVER, be shown in a Hollywood film. Sister Christina *of course* has to have a background of sexual abuse, because no one would ever *really* join a religious order without having "issues," right? Life just isn't complete unless one has sex, right? I mean, we can't *possibly* ever see Christians, and *especially* Catholic priests and nuns, actually living faithfully to Christ, right? Of course Sister Christina has to give in to temptation, because no one can resist sexual intimacy for a transcendent calling, right? Because sex is love, right? So if Christina and Joey have sex, then it's true love, right?But of course, why did I ever expect godless producers to produce anything but godless results? It simply couldn't compute in the Hollywood head that they could have made this film *without* the fling in the bedroom with all its emotional violins, and it might have actually been a decent (if very slow) film. Silly me again, thinking you can make a movie without depicting everyone as conflicted, cynical, and downright hypocritical.Amazing how one scene can ruin a whole movie.

Many films I see these days are too close to being on the level of a boiling excrement experiment to even be called movies at all. This was a departure from that-it was a decent film. Good originality shines through making it a watchable deal without making you feel like your being exposed to something harmful to your health. Jason Statham films tend to be not bad-with the exception of Crank: High Voltage which I thought was a bad case of stoned screen writers. Not a lot to say about this one other than it was a good film-I don't want to give away the plot line as that would spoil it. The other day I was looking at some of the budgets for big films in general these days-many big films cost something like 100 million to make and then maybe make a return of 120 million. They are also generally films I don't like. This movie looks like it had a decent budget-but nothing over the top like many others-where filmmaking becomes a case of elitism wins the day-too bad there are not more films with 1-5 million dollar budgets that actually utilize good scripts and make money well above what they cost to make due to the fact they are intelligently executed as opposed to something that comes off like it was done by a rhesus monkey. Way too many films these days make a marginal return on a gargantuan investment. Some big budget films don't even make back their creation costs at the box office-but they keep making them anyway. It's not the way to go. See this film-you will probably like it.