Pawn

PLOT:
Things are not what they seem to be at an all-night diner. From the outside everything looks normal, closed stores, lights off everywhere else, and no traffic but when police officer Will (played by Forest Whitaker) walks into the diner he finds out that his quiet night is going to change. Inside this quaint all-night diner are 4 guys with guns robbing the place. What seems like just a normal robbery but the leader Derrick (played by Michael Chiklis) has more of a reason for being there that his crew don’t know about. When Nick (played by Sean Faris) calls 911 for help it messes up Derrick’s plans with the robbery but with a rat on the force that wants to help Derrick by using Nick as the bad guy things might change in his favor.

ACTING:
Pawn has a lot of well know and well established actors like Michael Chiklis, Ray Liotta, and Forest Whitaker in it. Because of all these actors I was expecting this movie to one of those hidden gems of acting and plots but it turned out being just ok. Here’s the thing the acting is good, especially with Ray Liotta, but it was the horrible fake accent that Michael Chiklis uses throughout the whole movie. If he had just been using his own voice this movie would have been put on a different level but that accent was just too distracting. Every time he talked I just wanted to not listen, which he does a lot of talking. He gives a intense performance where his actions and movements but it’s just that accent that takes away from the overall affect of his character.
Both Ray Liotta and Forest Whitaker give a good performance but sadly they are only in the movie for a short period of time. In fact this movie don’t give a lot of time for most of the actors, aside from Michael Chiklis, the next one that has the most screen time is Sean Faris who gives a good performance but could have been used more in some of the scenes.

ORIGINALITY:
Not too original really for a plot, it’s a robbery that at first seems like any other robbery but it turns out to be something else all together. There are some decent twists in there but nothing that’s surprising or new for a movie with this kind of story. The plot twists where predictable, the outcome was as well, nothing made this movie new or different where the plot is about a robbery with twists.

STORY/EDITING/FORMAT:
Editing was done pretty good where the different shots moved around enough to keep all the other cast members in the scene while also keeping the focus on the character of the moment. It’s just the story itself that I wasn’t too pleased with because it’s trying to be something more than it turned out to be. This is supposed to be a story where a group of guys in to rob a place for money but there’s a hidden agenda that takes the story to a different place. Only problem is the whole time I was just wondering when it was going to actually go somewhere. It takes too long to really get to the real point and then there’s all these other minor side stories going on that go nowhere. Then there’s the jumping back and forth to the attempt to bring in the other characters and explain why they are there but all it does for the movie is muddle up the progress of the story.

BLU RAY:
Well, the story might be a little bland but the picture quality actually is pretty good. The detail is scene very clearly with the close ups where I was able to see the textures of the skin and of the makeup being used. With the story taking place in one location there wasn’t much difference when it came to what is shown on the screen so the colors in the scenes stay the same. One thing that this Blu Ray fails on was the audio levels are way too low. I had to have my volume up to a high level just to be able to hear what was being said.