Pawn

John Chard

Yawn! What started out as a planned easy robbery of a diner, proves to be far more complicated than the robbers ever imagined. An impressive cast that features Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta and Michael Chiklis fail to liven up this dullard of a movie. A straight to DVD effort that fails to grasp the concept of getting tension from the one location scenario. If it's not the laughable British accents putting you off - or that Whitaker is actually only doing a cameo - it's that the twist and turns still go nowhere fast, serving only to make the hum-drum pacing even more irritable. Some nice photography is a bonus, and the action sequences, while not exciting, are competently staged. But all told it looks like the 15 day shoot that it was, a case of grabbing some name actors and hoping that they can make an intended tricksy screenplay work. It didn't. 4/10