Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Mick Rossi, Robert Miano, Peter Dobson, Val Kilmer | Written by Phillip Guzman & Mick Rossi
UK Certification 18 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 100 minutes | Directed by Phillip Guzman
2:22. To think that this looked like a decent heist movie. What a disappointment. What a shame.
This is a heist film with certainly one of the most boring and unimaginative heists ever conceived in cinema. A band of close-knit criminals lead by Mick Rossi's character partake in the robbing of a hotel's safety deposit boxes, stealing jewelery to be taken to a dodgy and rather off-his-rocker dealer, played by Val Kilmer.
The downfall of 2:22's integral plot is that it lacks the intelligence of a good genre movie: it's devoid of the genius of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, the heist movie that doesn't show the heist, and features none of the thrills and spills and emotion that make Michael Mann's Heat such an excellent film.
The first negative that screams out at you through the screen is the camerawork – it's all over the place, and there's an extremely annoying green temperature tint running the entire length of the film, which supposedly was added to give a raw feel to the flick, but literally only serves to get on your nerves and have you pondering why your viewing is being ruined by such an idiotic decision from the editor and director. It does little to hinder the overall experience of watching 2:22, however, since it's just one rock in a Grand Canyon of flaws. Other such rocks include the sound quality. I was constantly turning up the volume to stupidly high numbers in order to hear the dialogue, only to be blown away when the soundtrack came ringing in. Imagine the guitar amp scene in Back to the Future on a continuous loop for 100 minutes. That was me trudging through 2:22.
The characters are stick-thin and we never get to know them, so how can we give a damn when the tail end of the heist goes wrong and what only can be described as a half-arsed revenge subplot kicks in? It isn't long after the film opens that the crime itself begins and it lasts for most of the film, so we get next to nothing characterisation-wise and a pathetic slither of conflict with the aforementioned revenge angle, which literally occurs in the last 15 minutes. The writers have taken the traditional three-act structure of a film, seemingly thrown it aside and clumsily created a story that has no balance to it whatsoever. An absolute stinker, and Val Kilmer's involvement, as a favour to a friend of his working in the production, does nothing to save it as perhaps the film-makers had hoped.
EXTRAS ★ Just a 30-minute making of feature and the trailer.