You don't associate the team of Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis with gritty thrillers - well structured comedies are more their line (Back to the Future, Used Cars, I Wanna Hold Your Hand). This too is well structured and it could have really done with more comedy.
It's a modern day take on The Treasure of the Sierre Madre with Bill Paxton and William Sandler going looking for buried treasure in an abandoned building... only to pick a day where two drug lords (Ice T and Ice Cube) have decided to use the same building to take out a rival.
This starts with a bang - a great Ry Cooder score, rapid intro into the story... a scene of a drug dealer killing a rival, a fire sequence, firemen discover the map and decide to go looking for it, stumble upon an old derelict, the drug dealers turn up, guns get drawn...
The second half of the movie was less sure. There were fewer complications, some repetitive scenes that could've actually been cut from the film (eg Paxton and Sandler building a bridge to try and get across to the next building, which was shot down). The divisions among the gangsters were interesting - I wish there had been more.
I kept thinking the film needed extra twists to push it home - like say someone else turns up: someone Paxton/Sandler know from their civilian life, such as a girlfriend... or an associate of the drug dealer that Ice T and Ice Cube kill... or more police... or the reveal one of the gang was a traitor, or two of them were going out... or something...
Sandler started pretty greedy and crazed (he brings a gun to the expedition) and just gets more greedy and crazed. Paxton starts a little greedy and wary but basically decent and ends the same way. I do wish these roles had been played by better actors from the Walter Hill stock company, like Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine, etc. Ice T and Ice Cube wipe the floor with them - actually all the black actors are pretty good.
All the "motherfucker"s in the dialogue gets boring after a while. The photography is beautiful. The concept of drug dealing gangsters referring to themselves as businessmen, using mobile phones and filming themselves on the video was fresher then... and the technology has dated. Unfortunately the social conditions which inspired the story haven't.
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