Criminal Activities

An extremely limp and generic crime thriller with a twist at the end that hardly even sounds good on paper, but certainly doesn't translate into a great ending. I had only found out that this was Jackie Earle Haley's directoral debeut, but after how seeing how it turned out, I doubt he's going to get another chance. The plot is almost like a crime fan picked all the parts of movies he loved and tried to replicate them, thinking everything was clever, but in reality it's just a sloppy imitation.

Might possibly be the worst ending to any film I've ever seen. It reminds me of Adaptation where his 'brother' takes over the film we're watching and suddenly changes tone with all these weird asinine twists. But Criminal Activities has no metatextual levels. Its just hackneyed crap.

decided not to watch now

Travolta gives off his finest performance in years but the generic plot limits the ability for this film to excel. Michael Pitt is also tremendous but his performance is limited by the same formulaic character design as Travoltas. The film boxed in each of the characters with a simple plot and it hurt the outcome because it made no sense with the big "twist" ending.

Generic title, generic poster, generic plot, generic characters, generic non-linear attempt to be like Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, generic sudden violence... you get the idea.

An amateurish kidnapping that takes place in a confined space with forced dialogues. My opinion here : http://opinion-as-a-moviefreak.blogspot.be/2016/02/criminal-activities-2015.html [Full review]

A film mixed with the Tarantino stuff that made John Travolta cool again.... except this time it doesn't work.

eng; [criminal activities]; vier männer lassen sich auf ein riskantes investment mit hilfe eines kredithais ein - und müssen später die zinsen zahlen.; (schauspiel fühlt sich meist nicht echt an; storyline okay; travolta lediglich für headcount;);