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Although the reviews of the film in it’s theatrical run were largely negative I enjoyed it but be aware the film does contain a large amount of gratuitous blood and violence and shoot outs that reminded me of ‘HEAT’ but take place inside a casino foyer.

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VIDEO
The transfer is pretty much on the whole, excellent. It’s anamorphically framed at 2.35:1 and looks great. Sharpness and detail are spot on resulting in a crisp, clear image. With all the bright lights of the Vegas strip, costumes and exotic dancers the transfer shows them all off beautifully with extremely vibrant and well saturated colours. Fleshtones were also natural looking along with great shadow detail. There is no film grain to speak of, even in the low lit interior scenes and I didn’t notice any artifacting, shimmering or any other authoring nasties. Overall an excellent looking video transfer.

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AUDIO
The DVD contains an English Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track. This on the whole is also exceptional. The big action sequences are awesome with the crack of automatic gunfire, deep bass musical and effects from the subwoofer, bullets whizzing through the surrounds and a thumping soundtrack coming from the front sound stage it really is impressive stuff. An erray of automatic weapons are used constantly throughout the movie and the digital soundtrack does them all justice, you can really feel the awesome firing power of the larger machine guns firing rounds with good use of the subwoofer to give them that needed extra punch. I did notice a tad of minor distortion once or twice from the center speaker during a shouting match between Kurt Russell & Courtney Cox but nothing that’s really worth worrying about. On the whole the dialogue was clear and easy to understand. Overall it’s a very engaging and dynamic soundtrack that’s really suited to the style and them of the film. Also Roadshow in their usual tradition have included a Dolby Digital trailer at the commencement of the film, this time it’s the fantastic ‘Aurora’.

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EXTRAS
Extras are slim pickings unfortunately, although the DVD is not listed as a special edition so one can be excused. It’s a shame that there to my knowledge isn’t an audio commentary of the Director, Costner, Russell & Cox as I think that would have been fun to listen to. However we are provided with

• a very short (11 minute) behind the scenes featurette which is basically clips of various scenes being filmed with a view from a handi-cam behind the main cameras.
• Trailer
• Cast & crew biographies
• a few other DVD previews.

This film is definitely not to everyones taste, if you’ve seen it and enjoyed it then you’ll love the DVD, If not then I’d recommend a rental first. As far as the DVD quality it’s up there with the best from Roadshow.