Just felt highly derivative

I actually wanted to like this movie, and I'm not a Vin hater, but I don't know if to blame him, or if it's just the state of (mainstream) movie making in general.

A few things;

Someone already mentioned resemblances to Suicide Squad. I thought the trading card/profile was a pure copy, and didn't Guy Richie do a similar thing about 20 years ago (and umpteen other movies copied that since)? What happened to "Show, don't tell"?


Likewise, the car chase scene just screamed Captain America: Civil War to me, I half expected Black Panther to show up.

Gibbons faking his death, I actually suspect that was meant to be some kind of meta joke as Samuel L Jackson played Nick Fury who fakes his death in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, note also how at the end, Gibbons is bald and has one eye covered, I was expecting Cage to make a joke about maybe he should grow a goatee. At least if they'd done that (ie Lampshaded it, to use a term from TVTropes), it would have felt like a knowing wink at the audience, like we were in on the joke, rather than the joke was on us (for watching a mashup of several other movies).

The bit with two of the characters standing back to back and shooting with both arms outstretched, didn't Giselle and Han do that in one of the F & F movies? (Actually, I just remembered it's probably from John Woo originally, but it's yet another thing overused in movies.)

Bigging up the legend of Xander Cage, eg "I thought/heard you were dead", highly reminiscent of Snake Plissken in Escape from New York. (I guess that was the closest they could get to retconning Cage's death from the last movie.) In fact, I wondered if the writers/director are big John Carpenter fans. Did anyone else notice the big "Pork Chop Express" logo on the yellow van that the main characters were in? I did wonder if that was an obvious homage to JC himself? It did make me miss the days of movies like BTILC in the cinema.

That's everything, I guess, except in closing I just felt this was a reskin of half a dozen team up movies. People have likened this to Fast and Furious movies but I even wonder if it goes back to around the time of Avengers, after that was such a massive hit, it's become a template/formula for some many other non-superhero movies, as I recall, even the F & F franchise (hate that term) didn't really become like that until about the 4th or 5th movie, which iirc came out after Avengers.


On the plus side, Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa were good, although Jaa felt really underused, and strange that I didn't like the Scottish guy at first but he was one of the least annoying characters towards the end.

As for Vin, people say he can't act, he was actually good in Find Me Guilty and Boiler Room and Pitch Black, even the first XXX was ok, but the past few years he seems to have just been coasting. The last Riddick was a step back in the right direction, and at least The Last Witch Hunter was an attempt at a new character but it bombed, so who is to blame, him for sticking with what he is good at, big, dumb movies or audiences for not giving him a chance in other projects?

Thoughts?