First, allow me to declare that I happen to be a bit of a Jake Gyllenhaal fan. I find that more often than not I really enjoy nearly any production he is involved with. That said, I found his performance in this quite stilted. It seemed to vary from time to time, but there were moments when something about the cadence, delivery and tone of his dialog just felt like he was phoning it in. For example, when he was asking the father to go home, he just kept delivering the same line with the same dead cadence over and over to the point that it broke me out of the film as I kept thinking, no cop would act like that. It's like hitting a wall then backing up and repeating with the same results. Another struggle I had with the casting is that it seemed to me that Jake Gyllenhaal's character was supposed to be this "wiser" role in the film, but this was hard to play against Hugh Jackman, who despite his character's flaws was hard to read as anything but superior to the Gyllenhaal character.

I'm glad they were in it (the actors in the cast are some of my favorites), and it's definitely worth a watch, but was anyone else bothered by this?