A patchwork pastiche or an omlet du homage

Rating: 6/10 (7 December 2012)

Filled with accomplished acting, but like everything else about it, uneven. The multiple roles played by the principle actors seem to have been given varying attention, and the mediocre makeup does not conceal the poor casting for some of the roles. Sadly, Tom Hanks never vanished into any of his roles. He remains the American Everyman whether playing the post apocalyptic Hawaiian tribesman with the Beyond Thunderdome dialect, or the despicable physician with the Austen Powers teeth. Then there's a bewildering mashup of Fu Manchu makeup, Bert the chimney sweep accent, and Caponean efficacy (where's the baseball bat?). Hanks remains. Hugo Weaving essentially reprises his Matrix Agent twice, once with heavy makeup and once without. He does a campy turn as a Cuckoos Nest nurse, and a mesmerizing and convincingly diabolical job as an Elm Streetesque phantom, marred not by his acting, but by some of his lines, seemingly lifted from the recent Exocist Begins (or is it Xorcist Origins?) film. Still a stunningly creepy performance. Hugh Grant does a fair James Caan for a Brit, vanishes into exotic tribesman makeup, but then the olderizing makeup fails poolside - wierdly, he didn't even appear British in that scene... I am not a Halle Berry fan, but her work in this film is refined, maybe the understatement makes her stand out alongside the Tarantino- infused characters. I believed her characters, despite the transforming makeup. The rest of the film is just good. There is some real emotional poignancy to the Do Androids Dream of Logan's Run segment and the closet melodrama about the music (I swear I've seen that before, but I can't place it). Cloud Atlas is not an original, but an assemblage of homages to other films, unfortunately of several genres, ranking from camp to high art. The uneven application of talent - script, acting, makeup - is not an achievement worthy of praise. Nevertheless, the good pieces shine through, and are worth watching. If one wasn't constantly distracted trying to remember where one had seen each scene in another film, it would rank somewhere above Waterworld and on a par with Fifth Element, somewhat below 12 Monkeys, and half an order of magnitude below Inception.