Critic Reviews

Aside from some character-defining flashbacks, a godawful score and sweat-enhancing color photography, it's the same movie as before - a divertingly tense yet superficial time-waster.

While the original was an art-house success, this English-language redo, now getting a one-week run after sitting on the shelf for a year and a half, doesn't measure up.

This is a lumpy, dumb, suspenseless thing that sometimes scarcely feels finished.

For a film about a "sport" where every competition is literally a matter of life and death, the oddly inert, suspense-free 13 is strangely lacking in urgency.

A starry cast and glossier production values simply work against the black-and-white original's strengths in this stillborn thriller about a deadly game of chance.

Lumbers, stumbles, and blows all its secrets at the outset.

What does it add up to? Nothing much. A tense, paranoid nightmare with a chilly metaphysical overview has been trampled into a blustering, bad cartoon.

As leaden as the bullets whose random behavior it revolves around, Géla Babluani's 13 fails to recapture the sweaty tension of his original 13 Tzameti, a French import that reeked of style and first-timer ambition.

The filmmakers are so generally clueless about getting the most out of a provocative concept that it's like running into a subtextual brick wall.