A hardcore action movie in disguise

Rating: 4/10 (6 October 2010)

After reading a few of the reviews on this site, we decided to watch "Inception", and we went with great expectations. Unfortunately, the movie was a big disappointment.
The impression "Inception" leaves is that the director tried to squeeze as much action as possible into one movie, and it seems that it was therefore that the story was split into reality and four additional "unreal" dreamworlds which are displayed almost simultaneously. There is hardcore-action with aggressive special effects, fighting, killing, excessive shooting, explosions, car-chases, snowmobile-chases and the liking in every layer, and the permanent hopping from one layer to another makes this a non-stop-action-flick while the story behind all this seems to take a back seat.
If one likes action and special effects, the movie might be interesting - the storytelling is poor. The plot and the technology involved are so complicated that, after a while, one gets indifferent. There is almost no identification with the main characters. In this movie, almost anything can happen, and the audience will accept it because it can't follow the story. Like this, no suspension can be built, and over two hours full of action without suspense and bad storytelling can be rather tiring.
The story itself is not very clever. The setup reminds of the "Matrix" - the old question of what is really real. However, the idea of an powerful Asian industrial boss who hires a crew to secretly invade his competitor's brain in order to increase his own profit (and who deliberately risks his own life during the operation) is very far fetched. He could just as well shoot all of his competitors, because according to the story, the Asian boss is so powerful that he does not have to fear any governmental action. So, why invading brains, risking the own life and the life of others instead of just getting rid of the trouble by shooting it? Then, there is a weird aspect about the dreaming itself. I can imagine that everything happens inside my own dream, but to have many people dream the same dream simultaneously because they are plugged to a special device... I don't know. I am not someone who screams for logic in movies, but this was hard to take.
This movie is just an action movie disguised as clever science-fiction which it is absolutely not. There are great special effects, but there are too many of them and after a while they seem to become an end in themselves. The story is badly told, and the movie leaves you with nothing to think about.