Dead Man Down, about a mobster and his quest for vengeance against a mob boss, isn't bad. It's filled with good actors, among them Noomi Rapace, Terrence Howard, Dominic Cooper, Isabelle Huppert, and Colin Farrell, the last of whom tends to be really excellent in more indie stuff (a Seven Psychopaths as opposed to a Total Recall, say). Its director and writer are Niels Arden Oplev (the Rapace version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and J.H. Wyman (Fringe), respectively, so there's some experience and quality behind the helm.
It's just pretty run-of-the-mill, is all. I remember watching the trailer thinking there was something going on with Noomi Rapace's character, that she had some hidden motivation or that there would be a twist of some kind. (I'm not obsessed with twists Shyamalan-style or anything, but I'd rather a movie be bad and interesting than OK and boring.) Nope. The characters you start with are the characters you end up with. And nothing too out-of-the-ordinary happens along the way.
There's the Generic Mob Boss Alphonse Hoyt (Howard), who says Generic Mob Boss things like "If there's something you care about, I'll find it and I'll destroy it"—I'm paraphrasing, but it was something cliché like that.
There's the main character's BFF, an ambiguously moral mobster (Cooper) whose Big Moment you can see coming a mile away.
There's Noomi Rapace's female lead, whose life was ruined by a drunk driver, and she wants to get revenge until Yet Another Fairly Obvious Plot Point happens. Her mother's played by Isabelle Huppert, whose quality acting wasn't able to rescue the character from feeling pointless.
And there's Colin Farrell's lead, Victor, whose wife and kid were killed on Hoyt's orders, so he embarks on a needlessly complicated revenge plot that at one point could easily have unravelled had Dominic Cooper's character thought to use Google.
In summary: Dead Man Down is solid, and not bad, but it's not all that good, either. It could be a Netflixer if you're a particular fan of Oplev or one of the actors, or if you're having one of those evenings where you want to have something on but you don't really want to have to pay attention to it.
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