A mess!

Rating: 2/10 (17 March 2013)

I have not read the book it's based on, and thank God for that, because I can stomach fiction in the 99% of all cases trough cinema only.
This "movie"... oh where to begin. The storytelling as countless other people here said - is absolutely wrong. It may perhaps have helped if this was a series rather than a single full feature length movie, but what's done is done. This interweaving nonsense... just confusion and nothing else. Some movies like Mememento and series like Lost get the concept just right - show something provocative - answer one question and ask two more - but answer at least one of those rather SOON because either impatience will repulse the viewer or the basic fact that a human brain in not a multi-core processor, and can most often times think only of one subject. Unless you are a multitasking-expert female secretary type... which by the way makes me imagine the plot/script was either written by an overly creative woman or a male artist who just does not understand how to tame his creativity to a level it is barely digestible - yet spicy enough to provoke interest.
The next big flaw is that due to these million stories that have to be told 1 minute at a time, to tell them all takes too long. And no - I have nothing against long movies as long as they are long not by NECESSITY but by design! I would have more fun watching a marathon of Billy Mays commercials than watching this flick. Oh and yes - the damned narrator. I wonder if that was the plan all along to have his boring old voice babble on throughout the movie in a faint hope that at least that way there would be SOMETHING that would tie the plot together! Ha ha ha!
The plot itself is indeed a bit stock, and yes of course all modern Hollywood trends and "popular" culture does feed very much into this movie, which is another reason to thumb it down. Many characters are of course waaay over the top, which is of course one of the pillars of modern popularist filmmaking.
What else? Oh yes, learn how to tell a story, before you release a horrible miss-mash. This is like throwing a three-course dinner into a mixer and being a self-indulging "intellectual" type, drinking this horrible mix while having a fake ear-to-ear Ponnochio smile. The people who give it 10/10 are just like that - full of themselves, full of their flawed admiration of an overrated piece of trash that will be forgotten as fast as the next summer action flick.