Colin Farrell stars in a weak, predictable revenge thriller from the director of the original Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Niels Arden Oplev’s (the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) Dead Man Down is all beer and nachos, fit to be watched in a drunken late-night haze but hardly worthy of your time otherwise. It’s excessively loud and vapid, full of gangster movie caricatures that hardly divert from the well-blazed path of mediocrity and obviousness that has been laid out before them.

Oplev’s story is standard for a revenge film. Proverbial killing machine Victor (Colin Farrell, Seven Psychopaths) has his sights set on avenging the murder of his wife and daughter by going after the man who orchestrated it all: mob boss Alphonse Hoyt (Terrence Howard, Movie 43). Hoyt also happens to be Victor’s own boss. Along the way, he develops a romance with Beatrice (Noomi Rapace, Prometheus), who was badly injured in a car accident and is also looking to get even with someone.

The only aspect of Dead Man Down that has any spark and believability is the romance between Victor and Beatrice. At parts, especially early on, their time on screen together is tender and subtle, unmarred by excessively quippy dialogue. Instead, Victor and Beatrice just gaze at each other, converse sparsely and gaze some more. It’s a love reminiscent of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which revels in the poetic wonders of forced conversation, deep silence and a lingering sense of finiteness looming over the characters. “Why contrive things with ceaseless chitchat when life can end at any moment?” their actions seem to ask.

Unfortunately, for the remainder of the narrative, everything proves to be brash and brainless — even needlessly pretentious in parts. Useless pieces of dialogue are spoken in French. Victor leaves a paper trail of photo snippets and riddles like the great cinema sociopaths of our time. Characters have allusion-addled names like Alphonse, Darcy, Kilroy, Luco, Goff and Blotto. All of this is injected into the movie to make us believe, even if for a fleeting moment, that it was crafted with higher prospects than the B-movie bargain bin at CVS.

Alas, it still sucks.

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