Without Remorse | Film Review

 

I was doing a binge of Jamie Bell's filmography back in September, and I noticed that this was on his Wikipedia as an upcoming project. I looked it up and it sounded really interesting, so I made a mental note to watch it when it eventually came out.

John Clark (Michael B. Jordan) is a Navy SEAL who has to go to dark places in order to get revenge on the men who murdered his pregnant wife.

I didn't end up liking this film half as much as I wanted to.

I haven't read any of Tom Clancy's works, and I've only seen one Jack Ryan movie, so I was going into this completely unaware of what it is based on.

For a start, the concept, while interesting, isn't really anything new. In fact, the husband/wife/child/dog murder revenge thriller has been done to death. But this looked like it would be a slightly different take on what we're used to. 

The film is made up of quite a few action scenes, but there were a lot of them that just felt lacklustre and underwhelming.

The main event (i.e. the death of John Clark's wife, Pam (Lauren London)) happened too quickly. We never got to connect with these characters because there was never time to do that, so everything that happened as a result of the incident felt over-the-top.

My attention was never grabbed by the film, so I spent a lot of time being bored, waiting for something to happen.

The plot is convoluted and quickly becomes confusing. I spent so long not knowing what was going on that after a while, I just stopped trying to figure it out. I officially stopped caring about the film at the 1hr 10 minute mark.

Nothing feels believable, I never bought either the characters, or the situation. That's not to say that the acting was bad, because it wasn't. But I didn't believe the characters themselves.

Overall, I wouldn't particularly recommend this film. And in terms of the sequel that has been talked about, it's not something I'm hugely excited for.

3/10