IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME since I had been back in my old neighborhood. A friend wanted to see where I had grown up, so we took a drive to the north side of the city, where I was born. Our first stop was the apartment building where my family had lived. As I drove up to it, the building looked cleaner than I had remembered it. The windows were new with brown vinyl molding around them. How I remembered the old windows, where we would have to slide the screens off before winter and replace them with a storm winter window to keep the frigid cold out of our apartment. I noticed the front doors had metal boxes with the doorbells on them. When I lived there the doorbells were inside the lobby. On one of the front doors there was a for sale sign. I was stunned to the point I had to pull over and run out to see what was for sale. It turned out the apartments were converted to condominiums. And the price was a bigger surprise. I had to drive around the alley to see the back of the building and was confronted with another major surprise. What used to be the basement where we had storage lockers, washers and dryers was now indoor parking spots. The third surprise was seeing the back porches and stairways were all enclosed now. Wow, no more talking to the neighbors sitting out on their porches.      AFTER I GOT OVER THE INITIAL shock of seeing the changes in my childhood home, I drove us around the neighborhood to show my friend places that held special memories for me. Passing first my high school, it looked close to the same except all the doors were now metal security doors and every classroom had a window unit air conditioner. There still was the asphalt baseball diamond with blades of grass spearing out of its cracks. As we continued to drive around, with me pointing out various places that had meaning to me, we wound up at the commercial street where we did most of our shopping. The area was unrecognizable to me. Gone was our grocery store, pharmacy, my favorite fast-food restaurant, and the clothing store where I got my very first suit. I could not get over the difference; there were various small, independent shops with handmade signs in various languages. I remembered a pristine-looking street but what I saw now was loose newspaper pages, empty cans and wrappers scattered about. I found it sad and tired looking, nothing that I remembered from when I was growing up. My memories painted a prettier picture, which led me to believe the main character in this action, crime thriller was experiencing the same thing when she returned home.      RETURNING HOME AFTER HER FATHER HAD died in a tragic accident, a special forces commando riles up a violent gang when she starts looking for answers to the questions, she has about the circumstances involved around her father’s death. With Jessica Alba (Fantastic Four franchise, Sin City) as Parker, Mark Webber (Flesh and Blood, The End of Love) as Jesse, Anthony Michael Hall (War Machine, Live by Night) as Ezekiel, Alejandro De Hoyos (The Contractor, The Man from Toronto) as Harry and Tone Bell (Sylvie’s Love, The Weekend) as Spider; this film served my purpose. After being on vacation for a few weeks, I was looking for a short mindless diversion to all the built-up work that accumulated while I was away. That is the only positive thing I can say about this movie. Both the story and script were a cheap knock-off of other films from this genre that were done better. Nothing felt connected to me; the acting, the characters and scenes all seemed as if the cast and crew just wanted to get the picture done quickly. Plus, it was predictable. The only reason to see this film is if you have time to waste with nothing else to do.

1 ½ stars