Welcome to the Paunch

There is something altogether sad about somebody really, really trying to be something that they are obviously not.
And I don't mean having a bit of a go at something you might or might not be very good at, but actual full-on delusion that you can pull of something you clearly can't. Case in point: James McAvoy. And before I get any further into this, let me state that I do like him as an actor, I enjoyed Wanted, a lot, as I did Penelope, I think he's not too bad on the eyes and there is something about a lazy english-or-thereabouts accent that really gets me going, but the man is not an action hero.
Which is made abundantly clear by his latest, euhm, let's call it a vehicle: "Welcome to the Punch", which was described on the poster as "an intelligent thriller" and for about 7 minutes or so really seemed to move into that direction, and then became a pretty standard "everybody and their grandmothers are the bad guy" type of movie that was made relatively famous by Guy Ritchie and that, as a genre, should have stuck with that man as well.

It is nearly impossible to spoil this movie for anyone who has seen even a smallish sliver of a gritty detective in the past, and I am not going to get into the story at all because, well, there wasn't that much there.

What I am going to get into are two main issues with the movie. To wit : James McAvoy as an action here, and bad scripting and editing.

Jimmy is cute, well, he used to be cute, and that is strike one against him, because full-on cute does not cut it when you are trying to be all gritty and action-y. Jimmy is also short, and a little out of shape, and he looks like he went to a good school and still calls his mum regularly. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but they don't carry an action movie AT ALL. Now, handsome isn't really an issue. Jason Statham is handsome. Chris Hemsworth is handsome. But there is a massive difference between handsome and cute. An action hero can be (almost has to be) good looking, but he can't look "precious", which is exactly where McAvoy fails. He looks precious. If you fantasize about, say, a Bruce Willis or a Statham, you are considering exactly how much of the room he will trash while entertaining you biblically. If you fantasize about McAvoy, you imagine long letters at dusk and the occasional heart-wrenching scene in the rain. And action heroes, if they do appear in the rain (as they often do), should not be using their time there mentally writing a poem.
So the movie is off to a bad start immediately just from casting alone. And there is really no amount of casting Mark Strong (who is always, always awesome) that is going to make up for basically miscasting the lead, especially if said lead is out-acted by Mark Strong even if Strong isn't on screen, technically, at all.

Then to scripting and editing. The main issue with this movie is that it provides two storylines that separately would have made one reasonably enjoyable movie and one very strong movie. Combined it could have been very, very good, providing you keep them relatively apart. If you fully combine them, they lose a lot of strength. And that is exactly what happened here. Two storylines that meet up only at the end are muddled together constantly and each one brings out what is lacking in the other, without providing adequate sustenance for us, the suffering viewer. Moments that could have real, emotional impact are flattened by their placing in the story, deaths that could have real tension are worked through quickly and all too efficiently and characters that are relevant to the story are only introduced after their deaths. This is not a problem in a movie where tension is built subtly and the story has to be pieced together by viewers who are invested enough to pay real attention, but in this movie, it does not work. We are told important pieces of information *as important pieces of information*. There is no puzzle, nothing. It's like getting as a sudoku-hint a completely filled in sudoku. I just does not work.

A short one this week, as the movie was, ultimately, uninteresting. I suppose fans of guns and gunfights will get their fill, but if you are looking for an intelligent thriller, look elsewhere.