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There are those movies that trigger your interest by a trailer, some time goes by and you never hear from that movie again until you walk around in your local video store and see it standing on the shelve or even laying in a bargain bin. The Son Of No One is such a movie. It’s a police thriller and features a cast full of well known names like Al Pacino, Channing Tatum, Ray Liotta, Katie Holmes, Tracy Morgan, Julliette Binoche and even Ziggy from The Wire (James Ransone). So you have an all-star cast, a trailer that does good work, how could it have slipped under everybody’s radar and end up in bargain bin limbo? Well the same reason as always: because it sucks.
Channing Tatum is a young cop with one of the most unconvincing mustaches ever to grace the screen. He’s assigned to a precinct in the neighborhood where he grew up and suddenly is being tormented by a guy who knows he, accidentally, killed two grown men when he was a small boy. This was covered up by a detective who was friends with his father since the people who were killed were a junkie and a dealer; lowlives nobody cared about.
First of all the trailer features a raspy voiced Al Pacino monologue. This gives the audience the he has a large part in the movie, which he has not. He’s only in three or four scenes playing a restraint role. The whole high energy whoo-haa character is nowhere to be found which is actually a good thing.
The story is constantly jumping back and forth in time due to inserted flashbacks which slowly shows us what actually happened. This is only really important if the past contains a twist the audience should not know, otherwise you could just create a prologue before switching to present day. As you might have guessed the whole 1986 story line doesn’t really have a twist worthy of gradually showing us what happened.
The main whodunit aspect centers around who’s calling Tatum and his wife and threatening to blow the lit on the cover up from 1986. One of the problems I had with this movie is that not only one of the main characters is known for playing villainous roles, but you can also quite clearly recognize his voice during a couple of the phone calls. It comes as no surprise when he’s reveled to actually being the caller.
Now this train wreck of a movie completely derails at the ending of it. If you haven’t seen the movie this might spoil something for you. Three white (ex-)cops in plain clothes, go to a roof in a black neighborhood in broad daylight to kill a black character who they suspect of feeding the details of the cover up to the press. This is their master plan? Really?
This is the kind of stupidity The Son Of No One throws at us and it’s a damn shame because I was really looking out for a good police thriller with legendary actors like Al Pacino and Ray Liotta. At least somebody at the studio saw what a piece of shit this movie was and saw that every dime spent on marketing it would be a waste.
