The film centers around brothers Mike (Avelawance Phillips) and Tre (Malik Barnhardt). The opening scene is a teaser that repeats itself 40 minutes into the film. No sense attempting to figure out what it has to do with the plot. Mike recently gets out of prison and wants to spend time with his daughter. His ex-wife wants nothing to do with him. He gets involved in a fool proof bank robbery.

Meanwhile his brother wants to do his last job. He is transporting money to "El Loco" (Danny Trejo) a bad guy in Mexico. At age 13 "El Loco" killed two grown men with his school pencil for raping his sister. Then he killed her so she wouldn't have to live with the shame. Shades of Keyser Söze. And a 30 minute plot spoiler...they have to bring back a kidney because no one in the US will give one up for the gross amounts of cash they are shelling out to get one from Mexico. Add some more undeveloped plot twists, some killing etc.

A kidney? Seriously? Everyone has two and you can live with one. I can't imagine getting a kidney donor is not that tough. Now if they made it a liver, I could see that. Danny Trejo who doesn't have 513 degrees as the cover suggests is in the film for only a couple of minutes. The 513 is explained at the end of the film, as it appears no one could come up with a decent clever title. What is the shelf life of a kidney in a small igloo cooler in the desert? They do make coolers that plug into the vehicle lighter.

The plot wasn't tight. The drama outweighed the action and wasn't that great. The film wasn't engaging and you really didn't care what happened to the main characters which were all criminals and weasels. Not worth a special effort to watch.

F-bomb. Brief stripper nudity.

A strange bird of a movie. Brilliant in some of the work, really bad in others. Difficult to give a grade, but it ends up somewhere from mediocre to quite bad. It starts up very good, but goes down from there. Still it's in a way not entirely without interest.

The film starts off with a great tension, when a police man stops by a car where a man is sitting besides a lot of empty bear cans. We understand that there's more to it, because then tension is high, helped our with both the dramatized acting as well as the music. Then with the opening credits we get a stunning birds eye look over the big city, with big sentimental music. Loved the opening. When it starts off like this, it's very promising. But then it's like someone lost it completely.

A nice script idea, though it should maybe have been cut 15-20 minutes, to make it more tight. The film is slow paced, both in rhythm and dialog. It's quite bad-ass In a gangster' way. Maybe the film is trying to be too much? Too many stories in one? Strange ways of using retrospective techniques, as you never knows when it's happening. I think writer, editor and director Kader Ayd should have had some qualified help here, with tidying up the script and some of the other, because with good guidance this could have been a great story.

Tom Sizemore and Danny Trejo are both good psychopaths, as well as James Russo is showing their talents, and knows what to do with their roles. Some if the actors are lesser known, and they are struggling big time under the direction. Not enough to ruin all the tension, though in the beginning, because you hope you'll be able to see through it, but half way you realize it's more than enough to ruin the overall impression.

The film takes on a big job, and the ideas are close to what could have been a very effective thriller, but ending up in an awful mess.

Well, to sum it up, it ends all over the scale:

10) Surprises, and end credits song "Never been in love" by David A Stewart (of Eurythmics) and Charlotte Carter Allen. 9) Idea and inspiration. 8) Talented focused filming, and the panoramas. 7) Opening tension and opening credits. 6) The known actors' acting. 5) The music and overall score. 4) Make up, believability and the incoherent storytelling. 3) Script and the casting of the unknown actors, and their acting. 2) Rhythm, pace and ending pathos. 1) instruction, slow dialog and the overall direction.

Overall score: 3, due to the small parts which made me intrigued, in what is really an unfinished and crappy movie.

Five Thirteen is similar in concept to Crash and Babel in which several people's lives unexpectedly intersect. That may be a weakness to some people, but nevertheless the film held my attention well.

However, this is not the best of films, either. It got a little weak toward the end with how they did the big tie-up, and the Taryn Manning story was the weakest part of it, but there's some solid acting here (some of the cast, anyway) and some surprises along the way too.

I had never heard of Kader Ayd before this and he hasn't directed very many films (none in over 3 years either, so who knows if/when he will) but this is an admirable effort. I will probably watch it again sometime soon.