Seriously flawed, mindless explosions

Rating: 4/10 (29 July 2010)

In summary, if you consider yourself a seriously thinking individual who wants more than mindless explosions, then you will be dissatisfied with this movie. It is littered with flaws.
Firstly the film is amoral. All of the characters are criminals, yet in this film the audience is encouraged to like them or at least ignore their shortcomings as if what they do is nothing more than unfortunate or a product of circumstances or society. Then there is the cavalier way in which a young girl is lured into a life of crime. Hey, but it's cool, so therefore okay! No its not! I can understand and believe that a university professor would happily introduce the girl to the criminal – basically, the professor is "aiding and abetting", and university lecturers are warping kids' minds to their own left-wing ideology every day, without a shred of guilt, so I can accept this professor's involvement in this perversion of the girl. But its offensive that the movie treats this as acceptable behavior.
Then we are supposed to believe that DiCaprio's character can get the girl into one of his dreams without her knowledge – how that happened is never made clear. And then when she finds out that her mind has been violated, she doesn't really seem to mind. You'd think she'd be straight to the police. But supposedly the dream world is so alluring, that she doesn't mind that what they are proposing is illegal, a violation of someone else's mind, and that she's putting her trust in a criminal who had no qualms in violating her, and who is himself, psychologically and morally corrupt. Would a supposedly well-rounded girl really be that suicidal? A troubled, tattooed girl on the streets, struggling with a drug habit, might have been a more plausible character. But a clean cut girl attending University? Hopefully society hasn't sunk to that depth yet, where a girl of that background can be corrupted so easily and her exploitation then tolerated if not celebrated by the audience.
Now onto some of the other flaws. One of the main faults, was that the van was hit and penetrated by multiple bullets over an extended period of time and only one person was wounded. We kept seeing shots of the van with bullets slamming into it, yet no one else is hit – even though the van is riddled with bullets and no panel left untouched. Most of the bullets went through the van, but in one scene a bullet hit the edge of the van door and hardly damage the paint.
Some people seem to think that because it is a dream, anything can happen. So are there no rules? Wasn't the world designed in advance by the architect? Is the world supposed to be redesigned or altered in dream-time, and if so why did that guy get shot, and why couldn't he be healed instantly by the dreamer. There seemed to be many contradictions. Sometimes the worlds acted as if they were pre-defined and unalterable -- other than by the mind in whose head the dream was occurring, unconsciously fighting off the interference. But at other times the person who was dreaming seemed to be able to control everything.
I'm also confused as to whose head was hosting each dream.
How can a sequence of explosions in three different dreams be timed to such perfection that each goes off one after the other in sequence? Particularly without a sophisticated timing device (and when different dreams were being controlled by different people, if that was the case). DiCaprio seemed to work out the timing in his head. Nonsense.
And the ski lodge scene was also unbelievable. The character was invincible, which led credence to the idea that it was his dream. But then if that was the case, why go to all of this trouble blowing up the building. The guy whose mind they were infecting, was dead or unconscious towards the end of the scene. So couldn't the dreamer just dream that the building drops off a cliff or is hit by an alien spacecraft or something equally preposterous.
Since they made it so involved in causing the fall, I assume that the dreamer was limited in what they could do, and that is borne out by most of the dreams in the movie being constrained by real world consequences. So I think the dreamer was constrained as to what they could do, otherwise they wouldn't need the fuss trying to get an explosion to occur.
The explosive charges weren't drilled into the reinforced concrete walls of the building, so the explosions wouldn't have destroyed the building. And then when the explosions occurred it is more likely that the upper story would have crashed down on their bodies, squashing them without any feeling of falling being involved.
There are many more flaws in this movie: the Asian character that had been shot wakes up just at the right moment to lob a grenade down the tunnel; DiCaprio hasn't heard of the phone or email and so must travel the world to be his criminal cronies; there is too much shaky camera (the cinematographer hasn't heard of a steady cam; the dream within a dream concept is a rip off of the VR (virtual reality) worlds within worlds, that was done much better in the movie 13th Floor many years ago; there is none stop action that ends up being boring; we don't care about the characters or the main goal of the crime; dreams (or even memories) are presented in too much detail.
My advice if you are someone who likes it when a movie hangs together, is to switch off your mind while you watch this movie and to accept that it makes little to no sense at all.