Should have fired the director
The movie is mediocre, I suppose it's okay for an action thriller if you have a couple hours to pass and nothing better to do.
However, large parts of it were unwatchable for me. The director has this annoying habit of flashing the screen at you with this stroboscopic effect, brightening and darkening in rapid succession like a light flickering. This is especially noticeable in action scenes, specially when he wants Denzel to look badass. Apparently, he does not trust his actors to look badass enough, so he helps them along with blaring mexican rap music while the screen flickers in synchrony with the beat. Like if you can't afford good actors or realistic sets, you flash the screen so the audience can't see anything anyway. Which is a shame, because the actors are adequate, they don't need this kind of help. Why give your audience seizures with flashing lights?
Another trick he uses is overlaying several scenes on top of each other. You know, like when you want to change perspectives, you fade out one scene and fade in another on top. Well, if that's a cool effect, our director is extra special cool. He overlays not two, but 3 or 4 scenes all on top of each other until everything is a blur. And it's not a transition, it's an effect he wants you to appreciate for itself, so he lingers. Expect quite a few cool breaks in the action when you can see 3-4 simultaneous fade ins and fade outs all piled on top of each other. Don't worry if you can't make out what's happening, it's the effect that's cool, the action doesn't matter.
This amateurish choice of photography ruins what could have otherwise been a halfway decent film. I wonder that he didn't include lots of lens flares, I've heard all the cool kids are using them.
The other problem is that a substantial part of the movie is in Spanish, with absolutely no translation whatsoever. If you don't speak Spanish, you are out of luck, because you will have no idea what they're saying. However, this isn't a huge loss, because really you could watch the whole movie with the sound completely off, and still guess what's happening. It has no plot worth speaking of, so nothing is lost by not understanding the dialog. But it is still annoying. These days you can turn on subtitles, but I wonder what people thought when they saw it in theaters. Assuming it didn't go straight to video. I didn't bother, because subtitles distract me, and really the movie doesn't make you care enough to want to understand the dialog. It's enough to know "okay, gangster saying gangster things" or "police officer saying police officer stuff" or "reporter, must be talking reporter stuff in Spanish".
It makes me wonder why relatively decent actors like Denzel Washington sign up with such amateurish directors. They must know that no matter how well you act or even if you manage to hire an okay writer, the director will still manage to ruin it with his adolescent screen flashing because I guess at his age that's cool.