Critic Reviews

It’s no secret that Jason Statham demonstrates remarkable flair when it comes to bone-crunching action-movie mayhem, but he deserves special props for making some of the more outrageous flights of macho fantasy in Wild Card seem credible.

There’s a modern noir story struggling to get out of Wild Card, just as there was in "Heat," and you can feel it every time Statham – a fine actor even when he’s not rearranging people’s skeletal structure – has to sit down, stare into yet another tumbler of vodka rocks and contemplate the miserable life sentence of his habit.

I really enjoyed listening to Statham talk. His fight scenes have their predictable, violent payoffs, but his rambling monologues are unexpectedly, gloriously entertaining. This film’s tagline should be “Come for the stabbing, stay for the gabbing!”

A largely forgettable lark, notable more for its slight diversions from action-movie norms than anything else.

By doubling down on a movie that yearns to be both introspective and bone-crunchingly cool, Wild Card overplays its hand.

As usual, Statham gets a lot of mileage out of his droll, ever-present scowl, but as in “Heat,” the movie’s disparate narrative strands never really come together, and the climactic showdown feels pretty anticlimactic.

Somewhat less than the sum of its many amusing or at least unusual parts. But with Goldman, West and all these classy co-stars, he’s at least kicking butt in better company these days.

Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Anne Heche, and Sofia Vergara all pop up in glorified cameos and give the movie more fizz than their roles require. Which begs the question: Why would they sign on for such thankless, bite-size roles?

Trying to find a middle ground between an action packed Statham vehicle, a '70s style mood piece, and a '90s era, character-actor packed crime tale, Wild Card is not surprisingly an unsuccessful marriage of those ill-fitting genres.

Overstuffed and distractible, this episodic redo feels like a couple episodes of some Showtime series stitched into a feature.