Bullet Head

Three criminals - Walker, Stacy, Gage (John Malkovich, Adrien Brody, and Rory Culkin respectively) - hole up in an old storage facility after a heist of a pharmacy goes wrong. While they wait for sundown, when their ride will possibly show up, if the cops aren't around, they find out someone had been using the place for dogfights. And the meanest, toughest dog, objected to being put down and is still roaming the place.

So there's a bit of a horror movie aspect to it. A little bit of the latter half of Jaws, only instead of three guys trapped on a crappy boat, it's three guys trapped in crumbling warehouse. There are plenty of big metal doors to keep between them and the dog, but that's going to make it hard to escape. And once they have to venture into those narrow, mazelike halls, they're in trouble.

The movie also spends a lot of time on flashbacks. The crooks exchange stories from their past; heists gone wrong, heists gone right, bad childhood experiences. Some of them are fairly comical, others are pretty sad. There are also several flashbacks of the dog's life, which show it isn't the villain here. It was a perfectly good, friendly dog some asshole decided to turn into a killing machine to make them money.

So it's an interesting contrast between the two halves, but it works. The flashbacks help build the characters, human and canine, and then you have the occasional tense chase sequence to break things up. So it takes the time to try and get you to care about the characters, so that when they're running for their lives we actually want them to make it.

The dog's owner seems to think what a person (or dog) does is what they are. That's all, no changing it, just a problem to be dealt with. He says a dog that fights is a fighting dog. Which ignores the fact it wasn't a fighting dog until he decided to make it one. All the other characters acknowledge the impact of life experiences on their outlooks. Gage had a shitty childhood, which he tries to escape through self-destructive behavior, which probably only reinforces the grip of his past. Walker believes there's only three ways one gets out of being a thief, and he has a pretty good idea which one is his fate. Stacy's can't seem to decide whether a thief really is all he is or not.

It's mostly not a happy movie. The victories are Pyrrhic, until the last few seconds. The very last scene feels like it was tacked on because some executive decided the movie was too depressing. Maybe that's not how it happened, but it's what it feels like. Still a well-done movie, though.