The Contractor is a 2007 direct-to-DVD action film directed by Josef Rusnak, starring Wesley Snipes as James Dial, a retired CIA black-ops marksman. It also features Eliza Bennett, Lena Headey, Charles Dance, and Ralph Brown, and it was shot mostly in Sofia, Bulgaria and Cardiff, Wales, standing in for London and Montana. Going in, I didn't expect much from a DTV Snipes vehicle, and the film was determined to meet me at exactly that level.

The setup is about as well-worn as action plots get. Dial is living a quiet life breaking horses on a Montana ranch when his old employer turns up to pull him back in for one last job: assassinate a captured terrorist being held in London. The mission goes wrong, Dial is betrayed and framed for the murder of a senior police officer played by Charles Dance, and he spends the rest of the film on the run, eventually teaming up with a 12-year-old girl to clear his name. If that arc rings a bell, it's because it's lifted wholesale from Léon: The Professional, just with none of that film's craft, tension, or heart.

A few things define the experience. The first is the slow motion, which the film deploys with genuinely baffling enthusiasm. There's a constant, almost compulsive reliance on slowing the action down, and while post-Matrix slow-mo was admittedly everywhere in the mid-2000s, this movie treats it like a personality. Scene after scene drops into a crawl for no real dramatic purpose, and it quickly stops being stylish and starts being tiresome.

The second is the lead performance. Wesley Snipes coasts through this on autopilot, bringing roughly the same level of care he applied to his tax affairs around this period, which, for the uninitiated, resulted in an actual prison sentence for failing to file returns. He's not bad so much as visibly disengaged, and a film this thin needed far more from its star.

There is one genuinely delightful surprise buried in the cast, though. Both Lena Headey and Charles Dance appear here, years before the pair would become Cersei and Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones. Watching two actors who'd go on to anchor one of the biggest shows on the planet quietly turning up in a budget Wesley Snipes thriller is, honestly, the most entertaining thing the film accidentally offers.

The seams show everywhere else. The plot collapses the instant you apply any scrutiny, with the CIA inexplicably deciding to gun Snipes down in broad-daylight London restaurants rather than simply extracting him. And the Bulgaria-as-London illusion fails most memorably in the closing shot, where the train Snipes boards to "leave London" is plainly a Bulgarian Railways carriage, logo clearly visible. After 90-odd minutes of pretending, they fumble it at the very last frame.