As a filmmaker, Guy Ritchie hardly has any original ideas, but he’s developed an action-movie style that puts the viewer at ease quickly and painlessly. His films, regardless of the subject matter or the intensity of the violence, eschew any pretense of seriousness, and usually the only obstacle to full appreciation of their intended entertainment purposes is the quality of the script. In the case of this disposable semi-heist flick, Ritchie himself writes self-consciously hard-boiled dialogue that attempts to serve a plot whose intricacies border on the incomprehensible, and so he is careful to make the explanations of what is happening at any given moment plain to the point of redundancy. Early on, there’s a sequence where he outlines in detail the contingencies of an emergency escape plan that the principals hope they won’t need, but, with perfect Chekhov’s Gun logic, you already know they’ll resort to it in the end.

Though Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill are the nominal stars, the protagonist is a young lawyer named Rachel (Eiza Gonzalez), a kind of fixer specializing in the titular legal frontier. Rachel forcefully comes to the aid of a New York asset management company that is owed a billion dollars by a Spanish crime boss, Salazar (Carlos Bardem), who not only refuses to pay back the money he borrowed but has already murdered the man the company dispatched to retrieve it. Rachel promises to get the principal back, with interest, for a hefty sum using the extra-legal means at her disposal and two former mercenaries whose names are Sid and Bronco (Cavill & Gyllenhaal)—as if they were a Jewish rodeo tag team—to draw up and carry out the scheme, which mostly involves stealing the money rather than talking Salazar into giving it up, since it’s obvious he believes he’s beyond the reach of international law. Nevertheless, Rachel does manage some legal hocus-pocus to sieze Salazar’s assets temporarily during their fraught “negotiations” while Sid and Bronco set up their aforementioned elaborate escape plan with the help of some super-efficient hired guns, not to mention a whole arsenal of real guns.

Though the movie’s grunt work is carried out by Ritchie’s able-bodied direction of the myriad action scenes, its pleasure principle is situated in the profane, faux-homoerotic banter of Sid and Bronco as they carry out their nefarious plan. Lots of people die and while the whole “grey” area inhabited by the plan is supposed to make you wonder who’s really “bad” in all this, it’s obvious who you’re going to root for. But if you’re not entirely sure Ritchie has a few ridiculous plot twists in the end that will make you come to the appropriate conclusion. 

Opens Aug. 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

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