Movie Review – Momentum (2015)

Momentum (2015)

Source: http://www.impawards.com/2015/posters/momentum_xlg.jpg

Last week, I attended the premiere screening of ‘Momentum’ – a South African – American action thriller. This one stars Olga Kurylenko, James Purefoy and Morgan Freeman in lead roles.

The movie starts off with a high – tech diamond robbery where Olga’s (who is disguised as a thief) character is revealed by mistake. The rest of flick deals with how and why an assassin (James Purefoy) and his cronies begin to pursue her for the diamonds. There is also a US senator (Morgan Freeman) in the picture.

The director Stephen S Campanelli does a pretty good job with the action sequences, high speed car chases and so on and so forth. The adrenalin flows through quickly among the various characters as the chase is on. While the pace of the flick doesn’t really go down too much, a few minutes into the movie you do realize that the plot is quite wafer – thin.

It seems as though Stephen decided to cover the deficiencies in the plot with a lot of action. But sadly, it just falls quite short. In the end all the killing and gore becomes a bit too much and quite unnecessary.

Moreover, even the character development is pretty shoddy. It would have been great if some back-story had been given to all the characters. As it is, all the characters seem quite under-cooked.

Olga really doesn’t have much to do in terms of acting. It’s all about action and she does pretty well with what she has got. Morgan Freeman isn’t there for even a few minutes in totality. The only saving grace of this one is James Purefoy. He does a brilliant job as the primary antagonist. He wins you over with his mean persona and attitude throughout.

While this ends with the promise of a sequel or more, I honestly feel that Stephen needs to pull up his socks if he is looking for a successful entry into Hollywood.

Rating – 1/5

Linking to NaBloPoMo (National Blog Post Month – October – My post no 4 for this month.