I wanted to love this movie. It has Anthony Mackie AND New Orleans along with a dark, spooky plot. What’s not to love, right? Mr. Mackie is as awesome as we have come to expect. And for once the Hollywood machine produced a movie with a black man playing an intellectual. That’s not nearly as common as it should be. Also, NOLA isn’t the in-your-face tourist version of the city it is in so many movies. There is just the right amount of subtlety as a backdrop, which is good because I think using the city as an additional character here would have been too distracting. That’s the good.

Here’s the bad: this movie suffers many flaws. All relationships are abbreviated as though the director was impatient to get to the meat. Therefore, it feels rushed and watered down. Had this been a meaty-type movie it would make sense trim the fat but this film has no more depth than your average YA novel. Also, the dialog is flat, forced and uninspired.

And the ugly: the best analogy I can think of is this: Guinness in the US as opposed to Guinness in GB. And it’s also guilty of one of the latest movie tropes (spoiler alert below)…

…the dog is killed off (sort of) to elicit a cheap emotional response. That to me is the telltale sign of shortcuts taken in modern film.

I’m glad enough to have seen it to search out other Anthony Mackie movies I haven’t seen yet, but I can’t say I give this one a good review. A solid C.