The story is told very conventionally making it by the numbers and cliche. The photography is a bit stale. It's so blue, gray, and washed out. Very uninteresting to look at. The movie is edited very poorly. There are scenes that go too fast. The action is pretty good, but it's underwhelmed by the lack of good editing. There are tons of continuity errors because of this.

I didn't think it was a bad first outing for Parker, but I agree that it's also rather unimpressive. I think my issue is that so much time was spent on building up why he was rebelling, yet when it came time for the actual rebellion, it was more or less over and done with in a matter of minutes. I'm not saying i wanted a Braveheart-esque battle with excess bloodbaths, but narrowing the event down to mere minutes is somewhat counterproductive in telling the story. It's like he accidentally showed the audience how little it mattered, which wasn't his intention.

Yeah, I feel like he should've taken some more time before he did an ambitious movie like this. Maybe, take some more writing classes and film classes. He needs to master storytelling before he can ever touch a project like this.