In "Dead Man Down" (⋆½ out of four stars, rated R for violence, language and sexuality), Colin Farrell plays Victor, a taciturn hitman who befriends his emotionally and physically scarred apartment-building neighbor, Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), who lives with her snoopy mother (Isabelle Huppert) on the 18th floor of a building in Queens, where they can stare (moodily) from the windows at the Manhattan skyline. Victor's boss is a crime-lord-on-edge named Alphonse (Terrence Howard). You don't need to be a genius to figure out that Victor may not be the loyal soldier Alphonse takes him for. Beatrice figures it out soon enough, trailing Victor as he sets up his sniper's rifle on a building roof. But it takes Darcy (Dominic Cooper), Victor's gangmate and best buddy, almost the entire movie to arrive at the same conclusion. The film has been directed in a murky, rhythmless fashion by Niels Arden Oplev, who directed Rapace in the original — and terrific — Swedish-language "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."
Stephen Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)
