Dead Man Down

The henchman (Colin Farrell) of a New York gangster (Terrence Howard) is really an undercover vigilante planning to bring the man down for killing his family. Meanwhile, he strikes up a halting romance with a neighbor (Noomi Rapace) who wants him to kill the drunk driver who disfigured her in a car crash. Director Niels Arden Oplev and a strong cast (Dominic Cooper, Isabelle Huppert and F. Murray Abraham are also rattling around in there somewhere) contend against the patent absurdity of J.H. Wyman's over-the-top script. Their efforts are not entirely in vain—Farrell and Rapace have some surprisingly touching moments amid the mayhem, and Oplev establishes an effective (if overfamiliar) gritty texture, and the picture is compulsively, albeit repellently, watchable. French icon Huppert is largely wasted.