I'm told the book on which this film is based is quite good. Having not read it, I had high expectations for this film based on the trailers and some good reviews. I was also anxious to see Jennifer Lawrence in this type of role. I was massively disappointed. The story starts off well enough. JL's character has her livelihood taken from her in an "accident." As she recovers, she's consoled by her shadowy, definitely connected uncle. But he has ulterior motives, and uses JL's fragile mother to convince JL to do a dirty job. This entire set up, in which we also meet Edgerton's U.S. secret agent trying to protect an asset, is quite good. But then it all just falls apart, and rather quickly. Too much time is spent depicting JL's time among fellow recruits in a strange "school" where the trainees are taught to manipulate targets using their sex appeal. By this point in the flick, little makes sense. What's worse, there's no emotional ties to any of the characters whatsoever. We never get a true sense of the stakes or what it is about these fictional people that drives their emotional state. By the time the final triple double cross is revealed, I'd lost interest long before. It's a shame, because Lawrence definitely showed potential for such a role, but sadly the script left her little to work with. Edgerton's character is also wasted, as is an all-too brief performance by Jeremy Irons. And save for one great, nail-biting fight scene, there's not much action to get excited about in this film, either. Filmmakers don't seem to understand that you can't just plop some theoretically interesting characters into a movie and expect people to relate to them without showing us WHY we can relate to them; character development is key, and this film is almost completely void of it. The only reason I gave it five stars was because Jennifer Lawrence is so completely and utterly gorgeous. Again, her acting here is good, but the script is not, so it's only natural that it's her beauty that ends up being the thing that resonates. And that's too bad.