I just got back from watching this with my friend, and I have to say...overall not a terrible movie. As with most movies there were both good and bad elements to this one.

The good....Mel Gibson. I mean, let's be realistic here, the dark revenge drama may as well have been invented for him. He is completely in his element and does a fantastic job playing the emotionally repressed father of a murdered child. It's simply something that he does with ease, and it shows here. His portrayal was good...it fit the movie, and that was the important thing to me.

The story is a fairly straight forward tale about a cop whose daughter is killed in front of him, which leads to his own vigilante investigation into why she was killed, ultimately exposing some greater plot behind it all. In other words...it's a fairly typical revenge flick. It is what you expect one of these movies to be, and it works as a revenge movie. The action is not what you might call fast paced, but there is plenty there to keep you from being bored. There are enough twists to keep you guessing, but the twists aren't so wide ranging that you're left completely in the blue and thinking that it's just a twist for the sake of a twist.

So the bad? Some of the acting is downright terrible. There was one scene in particular where Mel was talking to the guy that ran the company his daughter worked for.....I just sat there the whole time wondering if drunk monkeys had written the scene, or if perhaps the director was just smoking a large amount of crack cocaine when it was filmed.

Outside of the acting, the story was a bit....well predictable for my tastes, but I'm not sure that that will necessarily hold true for most people. I'm pretty good at picking these kinds of movies apart and figuring out how they will end about 45 minutes into them. Any way you look at it though, revenge thrillers are what they are, and there are only a couple of ways that they ever end. If you take the clues the movie throws you, you can usually figure them out with little difficulty.

So what was the overall verdict? It was a fun little revenge tale that was well worth the time in the theater. It wasn't one of the best movies I've ever seen, but it was entertaining, and when you get down to the core of the matter...that's what movies are for. I'd say it's definitely worth a viewing if you get the chance.