As time goes on it feels like creators are struggling more and more to tell an original story, or at least avoid direct scene comparisons to other films. Considering that the medium of film has been around since the 20th century it is easy to make a case that everything has already done but it is nonetheless disappointing to see a movie tread a path that has been thoroughly walked time and time again. While there are films that add spice to the formula and make it their own, Ida Red is a stale recipe that pulls ingredient from multiple films with poor results.

The whole town knows about the Walker family. Their ties to the gangs, the seedy dealings, the robberies, and many believe the take down of Mama Ida Walker was the end of their legacy. The police know better than that, they know that her sons have been running missions for her, and from behind the concrete and steel walls of prison she retains her hold on the town. With her parole coming up the good son Wyatt Walker (Josh Hartnett) has to make some of the hardest decisions of his life, decisions that are going to change everything.

The set up is something that seasoned movie watchers have seen a million times, the good child of a crime family is pulled into the business through external issues before becoming a full member. The most famous example of this trope being The Godfather but Ida Red begins with Wyatt already being a member of the crime family, all be it the least violent and volatile of the group. This creates an interesting deviation from the cookie cutter crime family drama mold but again we have already seen this deviation in the film The Town.

From there Ida Red just keeps aping films that exist loosely within the crime family sub genre that have been rinsed and repeated. We have the character trying to go straight, disposing of a failed operations members, the FBI becoming involved, and the creme de la creme of crime tropes, the one last job to set them for life. While the production looks great, the performances are solid, and there is one or two moments that stirred me from my boredom,  it just feels tedious to be experiencing the same story beats again and again.

The crime genre has the interesting benefit of being such a broad spectrum, because there are so many ways to commit a crime. From the old days of the train robbery on horseback to the digital world of corporate espionage and everything in between, the world of laws you can break and be prosecuted for is massive. With such a diverse world of crime why is it that we keep coming back to the bank robbery, the last big hit, running down city streets with bags of cash looking for an escape when we have seen it perfected in Heat? For what it is worth Ida Red on it own is a perfectly serviceable crime drama, the problem is if you striped away all of its “inspirations,” we would be left with a pretty stale 10 minute short.

5 out of 10