Staid and overlong melodrama about a loopy scientist. Very mainstream, but a very good performance from Crowe. 2 Flys Out Of Five

Rating: Null/10 (11 March 2002)

There's something about the tone of A Beautiful Mind that I found fundamentally annoying. For a film about a smart person it's not too bright. It's certainly not challenging. It's also too slow and at least a half an hour too long at 2 and a quarter hours.
The formula is solidly there. Ron Howard's film pushes all of the accepted buttons. That particular music. Those particular sets. The loopy professor. The pretty girl. Sure there's a big significant twist which I won't reveal and Russell Crowe gives a very strong performance, but I can't enjoy these sorts of films too much these days.
Still the film will make big money which means that the industry has again been successful at catering to what most people want to see. So go and see it if you like to see what most people want to see.
And Russell Crowe, if he can resist pushing the wrong people about, has been served with the sort of role made for awards. He doesn't overdo the overacting as is common when thespians get to play over stimulated types.
A Beautiful Mind tells us about a real life character called John Nash who when young came up with some brilliant idea about I've no idea what. Something to do with game theory whatever that is.
He's a stuck up malcontent who can't relate at all well with his fellow human beings which apparently dissociated him sufficiently well from common man to give him the wherewithal to figure out how all of us common men and women think as a community. Hmmm.
This left him as being some sort of brilliant economic theorist which sounds like a contradiction in terms to me, but probably makes all the more sense for it. Anyway those brighter and better informed than moi decided in real life, years later, after decades of testing, to give the good professor a big prize for his troubles, and troubles he has aplenty (but I won't go into that.)
But what of his peers, his fellow professors? The mingy bastards only give our John one flash pen each from the top pocket?
But then later Professor Nash gives a nice short speech saying that he couldn't have done any of it except for the love of his wife and that was nice.
But A Beautiful Mind would also have been much nicer if it was short like that speech. But then here's another hypothesis that I'm sure you'll agree with. The apparent length of a film is inversely proportional to how interesting it is. Present me with a flash pen!
2 Russell Crowe Flys Out Of five