Righteous Thieves (I) (2023)
4/10
It was pointless making this film.
15 March 2023
This has to be the worst directed, written and acted film I've seen in a long time. The over-stylized directing was trying to impress, but ended up being either cringeworthy or laughable, especially the outdated camera techniques and effects like the slow-mo scenes. This felt like a high school drama class production from the 90's, and I've seen more exciting and more realistic made-for-TV caper films from Lifetime and Aurora Teagarden Mysteries.

Then you have the overly cliched writing with matching characters and dialogue, that was parts from every other film in this genre, but this was done much worse. There was nothing unique or engaging besides the overall premise of the story, than ended up playing out like a cheap wannabe heist film. None of the characters were convincing, and much of that blame goes to the director for failing to direct his cast properly, and some blame falls on the writer who gave us the most annoying character played by Cam Gigandet. You will literally eye-roll and cringe at his character - demeanor, dialogue, etc, the entire runtime.

Even in its normally comfortable 91 min runtime, this entire film was dragged out with plot and technical issues in between every cliche available to this genre. It was just an unnecessary film written and directed so lazily, you'll cringe in all the moments that are supposed to be funny, and laugh at many serious scenes, like when the gold bar is being pawned and is being handled like a hollow piece of plastic. There is zero realism, suspense or thrills in this laughably failed caper.

It's a very generous 4/10 from me, because I can forgive certain rookie filmmaking mistakes. But there were far too many I couldn't overlook to recommend anyone waste their time seeing this like I did.
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