Bloody hard work

Rating: 5/10 (4 April 2002)

reading the description of this film on the cover sends a chill up me, as it's sounds a plot for the ultimate film. Even having seen it & not enjoyed it, it still sounds an amazing concept. In reality, it was very poorly executed.
I spent so much of the film re-winding the tape to clarify what was happening. I'm not saying it was complicated, but it required far more than 100% concentration. There must have been a better way of tackling time travel than this.
My biggest problems with this were the characters & acting. Bruce looked totally uninterested in his role & just ambled about (almost Stallone esque) grunting & mumbling looking thoroughly bored & miserable. Madeline Stowe's character was your typical unconvincing screaming woman, Brad Pitt weren't in it enough & when he was (though not through bad acting) looked like he was in a school play in the role of a character thought up in 10 minutes.
It seemed a film that deliberately tried to be awkward & complex thus to appeal to those who like to see themselves above everyone else in intelligence (but who very rarely are). It was also made for your "sci-fi junkies and anyone who dislikes anything remotely mainstream.
While I love your 'Back to the Future type films, I don't want all time travel films to be tackled like that. I like something a little more adult that requires more thinking & mystery. So, I should've liked this. Unfortunately, it just tried far too hard to be more complex.
In any film you should be able to (in effect) place or imagine yourself in the role of one main characters.
Sadly, there wasn't one single thing that Crowe done in Twelve Monkeys that any normal human, in his position, would've done. He never seemed to have any enthusiasm or rational ideas of how to convince anyone that he was from the future, barely made any references to having lived through the time period he was in, although this wasn't helped by him often being in a state barely able to speak. I never had an understanding of why Crowe was in prison in 2030 odd, infact only knew he was due to the cover of the video telling me. There was also the cliched "No-one believes the main bloke's protests" characters, made out as baddies.
The 1st half of the film in far too slow, it picked up a lot in the 2nd half (although I'd had a kip in between), but even the 2nd half was let down by an ending the viewer could peg, infact almost knew, way in advance and an end scenario that I couldn't help thinking could have been avoided given how much was known already? Maybe that's the point that, it was unavoidable, I don't know?
Of the people that give this 10/10 I can't believe any 2 of them have the same interpretation of EXACTLY what went on, particularly what would've went on after the film ended. That's not necessarily a fault as I'm all for interpreting films in your own way. It does however leave films like this open to countless plot holes or chasms, especially when you have a film like Twelve Monkeys that seems to ask the viewer to suspend disbelief but at the same time contains a highly complex plot.
I would've liked to have seen more time devoted to the future, at the start of the film, as we never seemed to have enough understanding of it as the film went on. It wasn't an awful film though. I give it 5/10 and usually with films of that score I have an equal amount of good & bad to say about it. Whilst this has good points, it's just a subject that could've been tackled so so much better, slightly more straight forward, with better acting, more likeable characters & with scenery & cinematography less dark & depressing, it looked almost post-apocalyptic in 1996.
I would point fans of these films in the direction of the TV show Jonathan Creek as how highly complex stories can be tackled in a way that is both straightforward, but requiring intelligent thinking.
I have only watched this once though. I reckon with one or two more viewings, little things will become clearer, lines I missed will be heard and I'll have a fuller grasp of it but I can't see it going up any more than another 2 marks.
A low 5/10