Review for Tokarev

After leaving a life of crime to go straight Paul Maguire returns home to find his daughter has been kidnapped. Her friends are beaten and say it was a gang who broke in and later she is found to be murdered. Maguire decides to call his old gang and find out who did this and why.

This leads to a blood war with the Russian gang who he has history with. What follows is a a bloody massacre that revolves around finding every connection to whoever did this and taking them out.

This film so wants to be Taken 3 it almost could have been Liam Neeson in the role that Nicholas Cage plays. It is essentially two hours of search for someone, find them, kill them, move on. In fact most of the time, they crew kill before they are even able to question anyone. You wonder how they will find anything out while they enter bars and buildings and simply massacre everyone.

Instead of the wonderfully choreographed gun fights of Taken, what we see is some rather odd and sluggish knife fighting which at times is fun, but at others you can't help but think 'Someone just shoot him?' Everytime Cage walks into a building the gang do the typical Kung Fu cliche of everyone taking it in turns to get themselves killed.

My biggest issue with this film is that it has a very obvious, morally ambiguous tone and because of that when you do get to the end you wonder what the whole point was. The tagline for the film could easily be 'The price you pay for lying and vengeance'. By the end, when you do discover who killed his daughter you do a facepalm that even M.Night Shyamalan would have thought it was too dumb.

Now, it is not all this. Cage's performance is as OTT as always and in some ways this is great. It felt like he was back to his Face/Off Castor Troy days and the character could almost have been what may have happened if Troy had escaped and tried to live his life normally. But he is always great to watch and even in his worst films (and this isn't one of them) he is still able to make it watchable.

The rest of the cast is completely redundant. Danny Glover puts on the same grizzled 'two days from retirement' cop that he's been playing since Lethal Weapon, Peter Stormare butchers some accent (no idea, it drifts between Irish, Russian, American, his real Swedish accent) and is only in two scenes. His crew are so faceless and bland that if they had swapped actors for each scene I wouldn't have noticed. Pasha Lychnikoff is great as the head of the Russian gang, but again given so little to do that you feel that it was a missed opportunity.

The DVD does come with Deleted Scenes and a Trailer, but unfortunately they were not available to comment on, but the Trailer is awesome and certainly sells the film on its being action packed, which it is.

Tokarev is not a bad film, it's just a weak one. Cage's performance is great and some of the action and fight scenes are great, but by having so many of them and without developing any of the characters and with such a stupid ending, it is a film doomed to failure. If you are a fan of Cage or the Taken films then you may enjoy this, but it's not a film you will rewatch.