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Synopsis: Jack Carter, a collector for a loan shark in Vegas, receives word that his brother has been killed in a drunk driving accident. He heads to Seattle to pay his respects and discovers that circumstances are not what they seem. His brother was involved with shady business involving internet porn. Despite warnings from all the principals in the business, and despite pressure from his bosses to return to Vegas, Carter digs deeper and discovers that his brother was murdered. Meanwhile, Carter reestablishes a relationship with his brothers's widow and daughter. It is his brother's daughter who provides the key to the mystery, and when Carter realizes what has been done to his brother and his family, he takes justice into his own hands.

Pedigree: This film is a remake of Mike Hodges film of the same name. It isn't as good as Hodges's film--Hodges's film comes by its North of England grittiness honestly--but it isn't bad. Michael Caine, who played Carter in the original, has an extended cameo in the remake, lending it a modicum of respectability. It is certainly not the kind of wrong headed remake that The Haunting or Psycho represent. The film ultimately justifies itself as a setting for a terrific performance by Sylvester Stallone as Carter.

Performances: Stallone give his best performance since Nighthawks here, and the film itself hearkens back to that period of Sly's career when he was trying to make serious movies before being swept away on the tide of action-hero stardom. Carter is an amoral character who struggles to do right for once. His demeanor is one of barely controlled rage. Stallone plays this marvelously. The model for Stallone's Carter seems to be the Eastwood of Dirty Harry, but the film allows Stallone to humanize Carter, too. His relationship to his niece, played well by Rachel Leigh Cook, and to his sister-in-law, played by an unusually restrained, American-accented Miranda Richardson are articulated with more subtlety and sensitivity than one expects from an amoral revenge picture. On the other side of the fence Mickey Rourke as the internet porn mogul and Alan Cummings as his dot-com millionaire financier are as weasly as they come. The film is well cast in depth and all of the principals do excellent work.

Elan: The style of the film is where it gets itself into trouble. Not content filming things with high grain, high contrast film, Director Stephen Kay transforms what could have been an honest attempt to mimic the gritty texture of seventies-era urban dramas into an indulgent morass of post-music video posturing. The film is edited too fast and the action set pieces are filmed, Private Ryan-style, in a way that prevents the audience from following the action. The result is an incoherent jumble of images that the audience has to piece together from context. This is unfortunate, because the LOOK of the film is striking.

The Deciding Factor: Balancing the relatively good performances with the annoying style of the film becomes a problem when the screenplay enters into things. The dialogue and individual scenes are fine, but the plotting of the film is sloppy and, at its lowest point, asks the audience to believe that bad-ass Mickey Rourke would leave a beaten Sly alive and breathing after kicking the shit out of him despite a willingness to kill minor characters that are ostensibly on his side. The motives for the murder of Carter's brother leave a lot to be desired, too.

In the final analysis, the film squanders the formidable elements it assembles. It isn't an awful movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is so close to being good and yet still so far from being good that it leaves the viewer (this viewer, anyway) feeling frustrated and hollow