Went to see this film on the review by Roger Ebert. It's okay. It plays with the busted gold heist, gives the star a wisecracking urban adorability, and holds the audience interest through the end. It's heavy on the high tech, illegal surveillance angle. I lost count of the number of monitors the feds have as they track the Jamie Foxx character, so I hope they got a good deal at Circuit City.
The movie does a lot with a little. For instance, in the first scene, we see Jamie Foxx and a friend about to rob a seafood warehouse for a couple of thousand dollars. Foxx makes a point to his friend -soon to be a coward- that they aren't hitting a shrimp joint. They're prawns. Foxx gets a lot of mileage from that exchange. Jamie Foxx is quite funny with the faces and the one-liners. However, it means the film is flipping between semi-comedy and murder/thriller styles. That's hard to do.
The suspense of the film is compromised by one thing. The tension of the last half-hour is based on the threat that the mastermind of the gold heist will kill Jamie Foxx's girlfriend and baby. It became clear to me early there was no way she and the baby were going to die, so that punctured the anxiety the movie wanted as a timebomb ticks down to the inevitable explosion.
Finally, the ending of the film is preposterous. You don't see it coming, but when it comes, it's beyond my capacity for belief. Given the fact that the gold heist was busted, it's hard to understand how in the world the film's conclusion could have been arranged when the bank robbers were clearly in a state of confusion and duress. It's an attractive conclusion, shot with an aerial perspective, but it wasn't supported by the facts in evidence. I think Hitchcock or somebody like him said you have to design a film so it's immune to "refrigerator logic". That's when the viewer of the movie gets home, decides to grab a bite, and when he is at the fridge, he thinks about the film, "There's no way that could happen." That's the ending.
Still, it's a good action film, it goes by quickly, it has a few laughs, and the photography is very good. Ebert was right, three stars.
