Avis des critiques

Strong seriously outclasses McAvoy when it comes to gruff machismo, though they're meant to be equals. But Welcome To The Punch keeps redeeming itself with a disarming respect for death in all its forms.

While Welcome to the Punch offers a realistic appraisal of the long-term effects of getting shot in the knee—after three years, Max still has to drain the pus out of his leg with a syringe—the film generally fetishizes firearms so bluntly it would make James Franco's Spring Breakers hood blush. When bullets aren't flying, the movie offers yesterday's goods in shiny new packaging.

The sense of epic size is merely overcompensation, as the writer-director has produced a shambling, inept micro-actioner with zero ideas to match the ambitious sweep of the imagery, making Sternwood and Lewinsky's face-off something more akin to the stuff of bad primetime television.

From their cool and precise choreography as they climb on four black motorcycles, roaring into the desolate icy-blue mean streets, it is immediately evident that the writer and director Eran Creevy, a self-professed genre geek, has absorbed Michael Mann's crime epic "Heat" into his bloodstream.

Favoring style over substance isn't a mortal sin, but Creevy isn't as enthrallingly slick as compatriot Guy Ritchie, nor does he have anything like the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels auteur's feel for Britain's criminal class. (He certainly lacks Ritchie's, or any, sense of humor.)