Film review: Snitch starring Dwayne Johnson and Jon Bernthal

(12A)

Dwayne Johnson in Snitch

It's allegedly based on a true story, but this thriller keeps pulling you up short with its unlikeliness.

Dwayne Johnson plays a divorced father with a steady construction business and a personal nightmare: his 18-year-old son has been busted in a drugs sting and faces 10 years behind bars, such are the draconian sentencing laws.

Johnson pleads his kid's case with the federal prosecutor (Susan Sarandon, as a gimlet-eyed opportunist) and secures a bizarre deal: if he poses as a courier and brings down a major drug dealer, Sarandon will commute his son's prison sentence.

The idea of a family man getting in-deep with a drugs cartel would be fine if it hadn't been done so much better – funnier, sharper – in the TV series Breaking Bad.

Johnson is an OK actor, but with that granitic bulk of his he's all wrong for the ordinary-joe part. And the risks he takes are absurd to the point of psychotic: it's a natural impulse to save your son, but you surely don't do it by endangering your whole family.