I can't believe this was nominated for an Oscar

Rating: 3/10 (6 July 2012)

This film was one of the most poorly written plots I've ever experienced. I had no qualms with the film itself; the directing was adequate (nothing out of the ordinary for this style of film), and the acting was great. However, what came out of the characters' mouths and the "twists" within the movie felt like they were written by an angsty teenager on the set of a soap opera. The two couples cheated on each other. That's the twist. Five times. The story was very cyclical and boring: someone is unhappy in a relationship, they cheat, the other finds out and gets very upset. This was repeated over and over.
I felt that none of the characters contained any real depth to them, and the motivations for the characters were hazy. Of all the characters, Larry (Clive Owen) knew what he wanted. He felt the most real in terms of his motivations for his actions. Jude Law (Dan) was all over the place. At first, he is painted as a young romantic who does not know what he wants in love, but by the end he is an angry, jealous, b*tch-slapping boy. There was no transition to this point, it just seemed to have happened in the last 5 minutes of the film.
"Alice" was the most confusing character out of the whole film. She plays through the entire movie as if she is madly in love with Dan, but the one line of "lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off" throws that notion completely out the window. Was she actually in love with Dan? Was she just toying with his emotions? This action, as well as having sex with Clive Owen, does not jive with the way she is presented in her dialogue. Many people are two-sided like this in real life, I am aware of that, but it is confusing to the viewer as to what her goals actually were, and so my sympathy for her plight is gone.
I believe that this movie gets too much credit for being "edgy" or "erotic" in terms of its sexual tone. The film was made in 2004. There are plenty of movies up to this point that have been just as sexual or flat-out vulgar up to that point. For example, did the chat-room scene need to be THAT long? It could have been established in 2 minutes that Clive Owen was, in his own words, a "caveman" when it comes to sex, and for Dan to get him to meet Anna. Although romantic movies are not usually this graphic, it surely isn't breaking new ground.
All in all, the acting was great, the setting and directing were fine, but the plot and motivations of the characters were awful. For a movie less than two hours long, it felt like an eternity because I knew exactly where the plot was going, yet I didn't know how the poorly written characters would get there. The acting in the movie saved it from becoming a 1, but it didn't stop me from rolling my eyes every time someone cheated on another by the second half of the movie.