By Jeffrey Frankel ’13, Arts & Entertainment Editor

Performed by an unmistakably distinguished cast of actors, Ric Roman Waugh’s crime drama Snitch unfortunately fails to live up to audiences’ expectations. Trailers misled moviegoers by enticing them with an “action thriller” starring Dwayne Johnson who, by the way, made a more convincing tooth fairy in 2010 than he does a common man today. Sitting in a theatre of people who, by the end of the first hour, realized that they were being duped, I began to feel like a fish optimistic to catch a delectable worm to brighten my day. Perhaps Bait and Snitch would have been a more appropriate title for the film.

When a high school senior Jason (Rafi Gavron) is falsely arrested for illegal drug trade, his estranged father John Matthews (Johnson) attempts to bargain his release in exchange for his own services. As part of a plea deal, stone-cold yet uncomfortably frail District Attorney Joanne Keeghan (Susan Sarandon) expects him to act as an undercover drug dealer to give up names of real criminals as part of her uncompromising anti-drug efforts. How is he to carry out Keeghan’s drug bust pyramid scheme, though, when he could barely stand up to four street punks in the opening of the movie? (Again, not the most convincing “everyday man”.) However, Matthews successfully locates a dealer (Michael K. Williams), which inevitably leads him into a much more complicated and dangerous predicament, as he must deal with a Mexican kingpin “El Topo” (Benjamin Bratt) who takes over the operation.

The film’s most obvious flaw is its apathetic approach to the aspired-to genre. It isn’t profound enough in its potentially weighty plot as previous drug crime dramas including Traffic (2000) or American Gangster (2007), nor are its action scenes thrilling enough to keep viewers at the edges of their seats. The irony that director Waugh has either performed or coordinated stunts in forty-eight previous films is not lost on me, as Snitch moves as lethargically as Gone with the Wind did when I watched it as an disinterested ten-year-old. This wouldn’t be so terrible if Johnson were not cast as the protagonist; “the Rock” fans will undoubtedly be disappointed that more combat scenes are not included in the movie. The promotional poster displays Matthews flexing his muscles through a tight button-down with a blazing eighteen-wheeler in the background, but he doesn’t even get a gun until over an hour in. Where the characters should walk the walk, so to speak, they talk instead in heavy-handed speeches, the most unfortunate being Sarandon’s melodramatic performance as a sententious anti-drug advocate.

The cast, though talented, obviously did not belong in this picture, including Sarandon; Johnson as an average construction worker is hardly believable, and pretty-boy Bratt plays an unintimidating drug lord that even the ten-year-old-Gone with the Wind-watching Jeffrey wouldn’t be scared of. Sarandon’s character may have been better played by co-star Melina Kanakaredes, who plays Matthews’ worn-out ex-wife. Between the two actresses, she clearly presents the most experience with and most believability in playing the unyielding female law enforcement officer from her work on CSI: NY.

Waugh’s sluggish writing might have been saved by a difference in casting; had Bratt played the common Matthews and Johnson been given the menacing kingpin role, perhaps I would have believed and invested in the story more. Or perhaps, if Johnson were not cast at all, I wouldn’t have expected an action thriller in the first place only to be let down by an insipid collection of transparent and preachy scenes in which the sum of the parts—a potentially thoughtful story and experienced actors—do not equal the whole.