It's funny, when I rented this movie, I hadn't read the synopsis (which is common with me, because I want to enjoy the movie without knowing much about it prior to watching it). So the movie began and I had this Deja Vu. A very strong one that is. And of course I remembered (four years might have passed and countless movies since then),but Tzameti was one of the better movies I had watched.

And now the (inevitable?) US remake then. Unfortunately even with all that "Star-Power" (Statham, Rourke etc.) the movie failed to convince me. Even the original director came back on board for this (he apparently needed the money),but it still lacks. Talk about lost in translation ... Not a bad movie, but don't expect it to be an action movie, rather a drama and you might find it intriguing enough (especially without having seen the original that is).

13 is an ensemble thriller with a high-concept premise: a tournament-style giant Russian Roulette game, in which contestants are armed and ordered to shoot at the man standing next to them while rich onlookers play a lottery to win big bucks. The concept is novel, but the execution of this film is surprisingly so-so, and hardly very suspenseful. Sam Riley makes a poor choice of protagonist, given that he's remarkably unsympathetic, and others like Jason Statham and Ray Winstone are wasted in smallish roles where they have very little to do. A good idea, then, just a shame about the execution.

One of my biggest hates is when a film starts with a scene near the end of the movie and then flashes back to begin telling us how we got there. Sometimes it works, but more often than not it adds nothing to the movie and works only as a spoiler. '13' was one of the worst examples of this I have ever seen. The scene at the very beginning, before we flash back 4 days, is one of the most ridiculously obvious spoilers you will ever see that a character is going to be okay until that point. A stupid way to start a very frustrating movie.

The characters in this movie are abysmal. On paper the cast isn't all that bad, but it doesn't matter how good of an actor you are, if you're given nothing to work with then your performance is going to be terrible. Michael Shannon for example is a talented actor, and yet all his character does for the duration of his part is shout his lines as loudly and aggressively as he can. We are asked to care about a lot of people in this movie. The only problem is we know almost nothing about any of them because no time is spent setting them up, and what we do know of them makes everyone involved seem like a scumbag.

Then there's the stupidity of the script. There is constant talk about how important experience is and how a character has won their last 3 duals (if so, why is he even back?) so they are paying absolutely nothing to win and the other character is paying 5/1. But there is absolutely no skill involved whatsoever? It's a complete game of chance. I couldn't get over how bad the writing was in respect to that.

This was a really tedious and difficult film to sit through. I would recommend staying well away from it.