Abel Ferrara isn't the most prolific director around, but after Bad Lieutenant he has an enfant terrible reputation on a par with Lars von Trier, and he's one of those filmmakers unafraid to either give material his own stamp or choose material searing enough to match his (probably aggressive) interests.

I don't remember seeing the trailer of this film, but thanks to Ethan Hawke's baleful stare from the poster art it looked for all the world like a globetrotting action thriller. Scenery from the trailer probably made me think the visual aesthetic would elevate the story I was expecting.

Unfortunately, those visual elements of darkness (literally – it's too dark to see what's going on half the time), long silences and people walking furtively around are all the movies has. If there's any story at all, it was impenetrable.

If you watched the movie without reading anything else about it you'd have no idea, but Hawke plays twin brothers. One is a mercenary operating somewhere in Europe tasked with finding a terrorist cell before it strikes, the other is the terrorist he's looking for, apparently already having been captured by some other group and protesting his mission under torture, either an extreme zealot or not in full control of his faculties.

And that's as far as I got before I switched it off. That makes it sound like I gave up on it way too quickly because of how little had happened until that point, but it took half the film to get even that far and I still had no idea what I was watching.

I don't know if it was attached to the general release in all format and territories, but the version I watched had Hawke introducing the film and talking about why he wanted to work with Ferrera. It might be an urban myth, but I read after the fact he made another one to play after the final credits in which he expressed his own bemusement and confusion at the final product. If it's true it would have been the best thing about the whole exercise.