This less-than-golden Snitch masquerades as just another no-brain action movie starring sometime wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. But it’s also a preachy melodrama about the way the U.S. penal system treats first-time drug offenders more brutally than it does rapists. Ex-stuntman Ric Roman Waugh is over-fond of hand-held camerawork, which makes the action hard to watch and borderline incoherent. He is heavy-handed in the dramatic sequences, which come across as soap-operatic, despite the best efforts in minor roles of Susan Sarandon and Barry Pepper. Johnson can’t make his hero terribly interesting. He’s essentially a father obsessed with getting his son out of a long, unjust jail sentence by handing over the real drug dealers to the authorities. But he shows more acting ability than in any of his previous movies, and the film does have a genuine grievance about some worrying legal anomalies. If Snitch ultimately perishes from over-ambition, at least it’s an honourable death.
