No ensemble or great individual actors; a horrible screenplay, and a cliched premise...put them together and you don&#39;t even have a half of a B movie.<br/><br/>For anyone over 18, this is like a trip to the dentist.<br/><br/>Grade it as an F.

I watched this film with anticipation. Could it get better, could it get any worse? Well the answer was NO on both counts.<br/><br/>Cuba Gooding was obviously NOT a bad guy. Matthew Modine was wooden and not a sympathetic character AT ALL. James Caan usually looks good and he lived up to that...though his character was a blank piece of paper, no life, no substance.<br/><br/>The array of Familia were cookie cuttered, I couldn&#39;t keep track of who was who. I finally started naming them bad guy in the limo, bad guy looks like Sinatra, bad guy stool pigeon and big fat bad guy.<br/><br/>If it promised to be a mob movie, it failed. If it promised to be a love story.....ewwww.<br/><br/>If it was meant to be a behind the scenes stunt movie....I can&#39;t go on...the best I can say is James Caan usually looks good.So I gave it a 2.

On the whole, I thought &quot;In the Shadows&quot; wasn&#39;t all that bad. There were times when the dramatics were a little overdone and the short part that Cuba played as a bad-ass international drug smuggler was really NOT believable. Poor casting there folks.<br/><br/>James Caan, on the other hand, was quite easy to see as an aging stunt guru. I have always liked watching Caan in a cool, collected, everyday-guy-in-extrordinary-circumstances type of role. He truly shone in this film.<br/><br/>Joey Lauren Adams was the one predictable dissapointment. C&#39;mon, a Pediatric Oncologist? Not with her language skills.<br/><br/>Overall, I felt it to be a good story. I can&#39;t figgure out why everybody else has panned it in their ratings. Sure it&#39;s not blockbusting break the bank material....but it was better than the 4.3/10 the rest of you folks gave it.<br/><br/>My call: 7/10