Terribly bad film

Rating: 1/10 (17 January 2005)

This film is one of the worst films I have ever seen. It starts off great with the main character (Jim Carrey) meeting a mysterious girl (Kate Winslet) on a beach. They then go to her house for her to pick up her toothbrush. During this part the lighting is nice, the characters look interesting and the whole atmosphere is pleasant. The film starts going wrong after that.
OK so the story is that in fact the 2 characters knew each other before that scene (they were dating) but had fallen out and had voluntarily gone through a (very far-fetched) memory erasing program (so as to forget about each other). So that scene is the first where they meet after having forgotten about each other (we only find that out much later) and they fall in love again.
As you can see the full plot holds in about 4 lines. Not enough for a 2 hour long film might you think. How right you are! What makes the film even worse is that in order to try to hide this evident lack of story the director has tried to tell it (the story) in a "clever" way by filming the main character's (Jim Carrey's) thoughts and memories. The result is a huge boring mess.
In some ways the complicated narrative made me think of Pulp Fiction in the way that it mixes past and present and that you can only really put it all together at the end. The main difference being that in Pulp Fiction there were about 10000 ideas (storywise) while here there is only 1. And this 1 idea just drags on and on and on during the whole film.
Negative aspects of the film:
Lack of any interesting story (already mentioned previously).
The darkness of the pictures, apart from the first scene all the film is very very dark (mostly because it's supposed to be taking place at night). This makes the film very sad and depressing, it feels like a bad dream.
Lack of any humor, the film could have been made better by a few jokes but there are hardly any amusing scenes.
Jim Carrey playing a kid, the scenes where Jim Carrey plays himself as a boy just look ridiculous. They don't work. Although these scenes might have looked OK on paper they don't work in the film.
Positive aspects of the film:
The actors are good (especially Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey), but is it really positive to think that their talent has been wasted in such a bad film?