It doesn’t feel like a mere imitation; it has too much wit and too many striking performances for that.

The script veers from comic, narrated episodes to surprising violence, planting early narrative seeds that yield some effective surprises later, a dynamic range that's pretty comfortable to old hands Travolta and Travolta's Chili Palmer wig after all these years.

Working from a glib, chatty script by Robert Lowell that's not as cleverly hatched as it likes to think it is, Haley whips it into something reasonably entertaining.

An unremarkable but solid genre exercise, one that shows off Jackie Earle Haley’s chops as a director.

The actors have the showmanship to chew the lurid, shopworn material up to bits, savoring it like a Royale with cheese.