Well, I haven't yet had the good fortune of seeing Driven or Get Carter, so maybe I'm being overly optimistic about the trajectory of Sly's cinematic bellcurve, but D-Tox wasn't quite as bad as I was expecting (and, to be honest, hoping). One part The Thing, one part The Shining, one part The Crimson Rivers and one part Seven (I refuse to call the damn thing 'Se7en'), it unsurprisingly ends up achieving nothing like the sum of its parts... but that doesn't make it a *total* disaster.
The main problem with D-Tox is that it's lazy filmmaking. Cliched situations, cheesy dialogue, inconsistencies, loose ends, severely limited character development, the lot. None of this is exactly surprising given the film's prolonged wallow in post-development hell, of course, but there are still far worse films on the shelves. Sly's game as ever, as is Robert Patrick; the locations and production values are up there with any major thriller of the last few years, and the whole thing chugs along well enough in a by-the-numbers kind of way. It's just that Sly's name doesn't carry enough weight to make this sort of thing a big deal any more. As another poster pointed out, the lead role could have been filled by any old B-list 'celeb', but I suppose you've got to take what you can get these days (you've only got to look at Charlton Heston popping up in the latest direct-to-video Van Damme atrocity to see that).
Give it a go if you can't find anything else worthwhile on the shelves. For God's sake, fall back on this before resorting to Ticker.
The main problem with D-Tox is that it's lazy filmmaking. Cliched situations, cheesy dialogue, inconsistencies, loose ends, severely limited character development, the lot. None of this is exactly surprising given the film's prolonged wallow in post-development hell, of course, but there are still far worse films on the shelves. Sly's game as ever, as is Robert Patrick; the locations and production values are up there with any major thriller of the last few years, and the whole thing chugs along well enough in a by-the-numbers kind of way. It's just that Sly's name doesn't carry enough weight to make this sort of thing a big deal any more. As another poster pointed out, the lead role could have been filled by any old B-list 'celeb', but I suppose you've got to take what you can get these days (you've only got to look at Charlton Heston popping up in the latest direct-to-video Van Damme atrocity to see that).
Give it a go if you can't find anything else worthwhile on the shelves. For God's sake, fall back on this before resorting to Ticker.