Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating *

Cast: Gerard Butler, Piper Perabo, Morgan Freeman, Fredrick Schmidt, Danny Huston, Lance Reddick, Rocci Williams, Harry Ditson, Ori Pfeffer, Michael Landes, Mark Arnold, Kerry Shale, Tim Blake Nelson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Nick Nolte.

Occasionally you just have to sit back and be astonished at how a film manages to be given the green light to see the light of day, how, despite the odds, it morphs into a franchise that keeps going, and how it hooks in one of the most respected and gracious actors of his time, the honourable Morgan Freeman, to what is surely no more than a down market version of No Way Out, a simplistic, basic thriller that leaves a taste so thin in the mouth that it could be mistaken for gruel.