Action movie with Olga Kurylenko
The scummy story is porous, obscured and weak. The best scenes are those with Olga Kurylenko, who saves this movie with a few exceptional performances and her beauty. She is however, the only stand out. The ham fisted direction alienates the viewer. Harvey Keitel performance was also not satisfying. I particularly disliked his extreme close ups. Without Olga, this would barely rate worth watching. She elevates an otherwise very poor overall experience to something worth your time. Another major irritation is the too frequent Italian voice overs with no subtitles, which irritated me greatly. I really can’t recommend this movie, except to those who adore Olga.

Manages to feel far too long despite its mere 88 minues
The plot is very run of the mill. There are no real surprises, just one twist (which you see coming a mile away). Ex-junkie starts out as meek, afraid, begging for her life and incapable. But as soon as her daughter is threatened, she becomes a SWAT-level weapons expert, taking down criminals in hand-to-hand combat and dropping bad guys left and right.

The male lead is equally one-dimensional and unbelievable: interpol cop who took down a crime boss is now being extorted to commit crimes and is suddenly willing to commit multiple murders and threaten the lives of every single person he encounters throughout the movie.

And Keitel’s character is a horribly stereotypical crime boss who sits around sucking down cigars and whiskey while “philosophically” musing nonsensical about life choices.

The writing and acting is bad to mediocre throughout. But worst of all: it’s just boring and pretentious. Rating is clearly manipulated with all the fake “10” votes that had this movie at a whopping 7.8 which is how I was tricked into watching it. And already down to 6.1 after I watched it even before my vote of 3. Predicting it will drop off a cliff before long.

EDIT: someone is now desperately attempting to astroturf this movie’s score by registering dummy users and doing 9/10 reviews. Note the users who left the high score reviews are all recently created and all have rated and reviewed only this movie. If you’re going to make an awful movie, at least have the decency to accept the feedback when people tell you they don’t like it – instead of trying to fake your way to a higher score!

Action movie with Olga Kurylenko
The scummy story is porous, obscured and weak. The best scenes are those with Olga Kurylenko, who saves this movie with a few exceptional performances and her beauty. She is however, the only stand out. The ham fisted direction alienates the viewer. Harvey Keitel performance was also not satisfying. I particularly disliked his extreme close ups. Without Olga, this would barely rate worth watching. She elevates an otherwise very poor overall experience to something worth your time. Another major irritation is the too frequent Italian voice overs with no subtitles, which irritated me greatly. I really can’t recommend this movie, except to those who adore Olga.

GREAT Movie!!
Great movie and I enjoyed this throughout. Took a chance as I like Olga and haven’t seen Harvey Keitel for a while. Olga is so damn good in this film, none of her recent films have appealed to me but this one was the winner. Harvey definitely looked like an older version of the actor we all love.

The story kept me hooked and the performances of some of the non-stars was a touch off at points but overall the director did a great job. The car chase was amazing and kept me hooked. I actually would watch Paradox Effect again.

My only question is why did they call the film Paradox Effect as this is an intense thriller and that title sounds sci-fi.