Superlative acting coupled by witty dialogue, but still too long

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2001)

Kinglsey was great; Charlie Sheen was great yada yada. The movie was too over-dramatic, long and boring. As good as the directing was, most people would find it hard not to fall asleep during this movie. It does not glue one to his chair by any extension of the brain. No, it's much too drawn out to do that. I'm sure I'm biased because I knew what was going to happen during the entire film since I studied Gandhi, but oh well.
That brings me to another point. I never liked the fact that it won movie of the year becuase it's not original enough. Think about what the writers had to focus on. Dialogue and symbolism and other extras but not plot because that was already created for them. All they had to do was fit words to historical events, but plot is supposed to be a major element in determining which films are the elite of the year. And shh, don't tell anyone, but there's no climax or closing action in this movie. He just suddenly gets shot. That's a cop-out ending, and the writers can justify it by saying, "Well, that's what really happened, so what are we supposed do."
Another annoyance of this film: pinpoint historical accuracy. The writers prided themselves on being overly historically accurate, so that's why I feel the need to badger them on minutia. Gandhi would never have said some of the things he said in this film. When someone asked him why he advocated passive resistance, he said, "I never advocated anything that was passive" because civil disobediance achieves ends in an aggressive way by getting people to passively act (if that makes any sense.) In reality, Gandhi referred to civil disobediance as passive resitance many times.