Rating: **
Review Date: 7/16/16
Cast: Olga Kurylenko, James Purefoy, cameo by Morgan Freeman
I love that Olga Kurylenko can headline her own action movie, but it's sad when the production quality is so low. Alexis (Olga Kurylenko) is an ex-CIA operative who steals some diamonds (along with an incriminating USB drive) from a high security bank. The owner of the drive is a corrupt US senator played by Morgan Freeman, and he dispatches one of his top agents (James Purefoy) to retrieve it. Purefoy is a nasty and sadistic man, but Alexis has no problem standing up to him and his goon squad. The cat-and-mouse game finally comes to a head at the Cape Town airport in South Africa, but the ambiguous ending provides no resolution.
The lovely Olga Kurylenko is wonderfully defiant and delightfully fierce throughout, with the exception of the embarrassingly awful opening sequence. I seriously thought I was going to have to turn the movie off in the first ten minutes, but it thankfully gets better once the initial heist is finished. However, that's not saying much. James Purefoy tries his best to be an intimidating psychopath, but his performance feels dull and forced, and his dialog is poorly written. And what the hell is Morgan Freeman doing slumming around in a production like this? The action scenes are marginally entertaining and Ms. Kurylenko's savage intensity is what makes them convincing. She doesn't pull her punches and gives the film a far better performance than the material deserves. The car chases are decent, except that some of them are undercranked to the point of being distracting. The film moves at a good pace, although every scene with James Purefoy drags because he likes to talk so much. It's not a terrible film, but it definitely falls victim to B-movie mentality.