Snitch

Snitch casts Dwayne Johnson as John Matthews, a mild-mannered (!) businessman who takes matters into his own hands after his teenage son (Rafi Gavron’s Jason) is arrested for drug trafficking. With the backing of a tough-minded prosecutor (Susan Sarandon’s Joanne Keeghan) and a grizzled cop (Barry Pepper’s Cooper), John sets out to bring several notorious drug figures to justice (including Michael K. Williams’ Malik and Benjamin Bratt’s El Topo) – with the idea being that the arrest of these nefarious criminals will encourage Sarandon’s character to free John’s son. It’s an absurd yet effective setup that is, at the outset, employed to watchable effect by Ric Roman Waugh, with the movie initially receiving plenty of mileage out of Johnson’s expectedly charismatic turn as the central character. (This is despite the fact that the actor is badly miscast, as Johnson is never completely convincing as a salt-of-the-earth everyman.) It’s clear, however, that Waugh’s excessively deliberate sensibilities grow more and more problematic as time progresses, as the viewer is, to an increasingly demonstrative degree, held at arm’s length by the movie’s unreasonably (and incongruously, given the premise) slow pace – with the less-than-engrossing atmosphere compounded by Waugh’s inept handling of the film’s few action sequences (ie there’s an overuse of shaky camerawork here that’s nothing short of disastrous). And although Waugh has sprinkled the proceedings with a handful of compelling sequences (eg Cooper spells out exactly what could happen to John’s family as a result of his exploits), Snitch ultimately comes off as a bargain-basement “thriller” that is, in the end, undone by its laughably sedate execution.

*1/2 out of ****