DUDE: do NOT abide this

Rating: 1/10 (29 December 2008)

I give this film a 1 for "awful!" I am a longtime Coen brothers fan ever since Blood Simple, and the funniest movie i have ever seen is - hands down - The Big Lebowski. I was thus expecting to be amused by a cast of quirky characters in a masterfully woven plot that entertains but also says something deeper about life. The cast here is classic Coen; the characters are classic Coen, but somehow all this potential did not add up to equal FUNNY. I really don't know enough about film-making to posit why this is the case.
Perhaps it's because there is no universal moral to this story (other than that the CIA has too much power). And unlike the brilliant Lebowski, there are no likable characters here - none of them seem human enough and thus I felt deprived of a good belly laugh over those recognizable (and laughable) human foibles which I found so endearing in the cast of the Big Lebowski. Maybe they just needed more depth. For whatever reason, unlike with the Dude, Larry and Donnie, I didn't care very much about what happened to these miserable people. I only expected that all their vapid and sordid machinations would come to fruition in the end in some kind of brilliantly intertwined crescendo (at least this is what i was expecting after such a disappointingly unsatisfying setup). But no - the film ends abruptly and falls flat - i found myself bursting out loudly upon seeing the credits roll with a disgruntled "THAT'S ALL?!" To be honest, I did laugh once, at Brad Pitt, whose character was unfortunately killed off soon thereafter. And I also had a mild chuckle at John Malkovich's outfits, and at George Clooney's rakish behavior. But this was nowhere near the kind of gobstoppping guffaw i had in the first 5 minutes of BL.
Thankfully, i saw this film for free from my local library and so these 2 chuckles and laugh cost me very little.