This movie was dull and boring; Boyd never was
I'm a Torontonian and remember this sensational case as a youngster. I was pleased that it was made into a movie, but this version really misses the mark.
How a writer-director can make a dull and boring movie about Edwin Boyd is beyond me. He was a tough-guy World War II commando and martial arts instructor who murdered two men in the 1940s and may have killed a third. He was hardly the hard-luck guy who means well that this film tries to suggest. He was an intelligent loner and often ruthless criminal who robbed so many banks he lost track. As the film shows, he was one of the most flamboyant bank robbers in any country. His "technique" of noisily leaping over and onto bank counters was used by other bank robbers. If he had been American, they would have made a film about him long ago.
This is a dreary and often lifeless movie that is more of a romance between Boyd and his wife than anything else. Exciting drama was completely omitted: for example, the shooting of Val Kozak (in real life, he was known as Steve Suchan) and Leonard Jackson in a Montreal hotel room ambush. Suchan and Leonard Jackson also shot two high-ranking detectives in a daytime gunfight on a busy street in west Toronto. One of the cops died, and it was this case that sent Suchan and Jackson to the gallows. In reality, it was Suchan who was the psychopathic tough guy, not Jackson, as this film shows.
Hilariously, Scott Speedman, who played Boyd, is from Toronto but he apparently forgot how to speak "Canadian". He didn't even try to fake it, so he sounded like a midwestern American from central casting. I assume that all the hands on deck, from the cast down to the publicist, overlooked the rather obvious fact that Canadians from Toronto don't speak like Americans. It would be something like urbane Sean Connery playing, say, Daniel Boone with a Scottish accent. The director didn't apparently notice the difference between American and Canadian speech. If a director is this sloppy about important "details," why should I care about his movie? The same for Kevin Durand (Lenny Jackson) and Brendan Fletcher (Willie Jackson). Both are from Canada but both live in the U.S. They apparently didn't think, for purposes of authenticity, that it was important to "speak Canadian".
This was a really sloppy and indifferent movie that reeked of lost opportunities.