Not Everything It Was Made Out To Be - But Good.

Rating: 7/10 (12 August 2007)

This movie is one of those that was built up just a little too much. Don't get me wrong, I did like it - but it was 2 and a half hours and some of it just didn't seem to flow as well as I thought it would.
The whole thing was touching and lovely, if a slight boring. To me other films that I have enjoyed (I won't list since this is about Cold Mountain, nothing else) which involved the characters falling in love and beating the odds have found two actors who have a lot of on-screen chemistry. So much that you just want to leap off of your chair and grab them and bang their heads together and you even get butterflies of frustration when things don't go that way.
But, Jude Law (Inman) and Nicole Kidman (Ada) just didn't give me that feeling. They're characters were too rushed it seemed and when 'that' kiss happened it was too predictable and too cheesy for a film with such a bitter under taste of death and depression.
The film picked up, though, I thought when Renée Zellweger was introduced as the charming Ruby Thewes. Her character had a lot of depth but you weren't bored to tears by her past but instead were intrigued into why she was the way she seemed but at the same time you just enjoyed her on-screen time. And also when Phillip Seymour Hoffman took up the role as the priest with his roving eye and the love for that saw I had to admit, I thought the film was getting good.
Natalie Portman, Ray Winstone, Emily Deschanel, Kathy Backer and Brendan Gleeson all took up the other roles in the film, however short, and in their own ways added some sort of attributes to it. In my opinion if it had just been a love saga without other characters we could look at, I would have been bored to tears (And I actually like those kinds of films.) And though the film was supposed to be focused on Nicole Kidman and Jude Law's characters love, I'm afraid to say that all my attention was on Renée Zellwegers characters development with Georgia and how their relationship would work. Screen chemistry is a must for me and if I can't see any then it's not worth the £15.99 I paid for it.
There were good bits in this film though, some acting (Not Jude Law's best attempt, though it has to be said he didn't have many lines), the scenery, the battle sequences and the fact we went back and forth for a while which kept my attention. What didn't keep my attention was the fact they could have told the story in 2 hours instead of boring me with other sequences that didn't need to be there.
The ending was predictable although it was raved about being "very shocking and unexpected." I felt sorry, almost, for Jude Law. He had around a page worth of lines and didn't even get a hero's ending as the poor bugger went and died. Quiet pathetically in my opinion, please don't let him die in other films. (He just can't act) I'd give it a 7/10 - and thats because I loved the Ruby character.