Drew Hunt

The prevailing attitude behind the film can be boiled down to a simplistic idea: the cruder, the better.

Its virtues as throwback don't elide the foolhardly decision to imprint an ancient mythology on a contemporary superhero framework.

It spends a lot of time considering the fear of knowing, which may explain why Alejandro Amenábar didn’t seem to know what kind of film he was making.

The characters' marginalized social standing is less indicative of a real-life epidemic and more akin to window dressing.

It takes place entirely at night, and the dingy color palette, washed-out and intentionally drab, presents Russia as an almost alien landscape.

Commingling industry shoptalk with introspective insights and wrangling testimonials, the film casts an incredibly wide net, but doesn't reveal much of anything.

The film's tired sentimentality aside, its general lack of empathy is most damning.

The filmmakers largely stand out of Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart's way, but they also refuse to modulate the story's racial humor with any sense of subversion.

The cogent character study nestled inside all the bombast remains crafty for its rare commingling of artful storytelling and genre nonsensicality.

The characters shout themselves hoarse, but they don't really say anything, and it isn't long before we feel like hostages ourselves, bound by the filmmakers' strained moral outrage.