Writer Ken Solarz has seen a movie or two. It’s easy to remember this when he keeps throwing so much onscreen that should be familiar to even the most casual viewer of crime movies. City Of Industry is chock full of dialogue and situations that have been in hundreds of other movies, and it doesn’t manage to put a fresh spin on anything being regurgitated throughout the 97-minute runtime.
A group of guys do a robbery, one big score that could set them up for a good life ahead (of course), but things soon go wrong when someone gets greedy, leading to a betrayed individual plotting some bloody revenge.
Director John Irvin mistakenly puts his faith in others here. He has a great cast to work with, but very few of them are able to improve the material. In fact, one or two (mainly Stephen Dorff and Harvey Keitel) seem to lean into the idea that the characters were written in a way all too similar to some of their previous work.
Aside from Dorff and Keitel, although they aren’t awful (they just seem stuck in a certain lane that the script puts them in), the cast also includes Timothy Hutton, Wade Dominguez, Michael Jai White, Lucy Liu, Dana Barron, and Famke Janssen. It’s the women who do much better, maybe because they have to work harder in roles that would be completely forgettable with less capable performers.
Derivative and uninspired, this feels like exactly what it is - a 1997 crime thriller that wants to be Tarantino-esque without having any actual Tarantino talent attached. So we’re left with thin characters, laughably tired dialogue, and a plot that tries to twist and turn slightly while heading towards a very predictable third act. Not recommended, especially when I can point you towards at least a dozen other “Tarantino-lite” crime thrillers that work better than this.
3/10
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