What went wrong? Nolan was rather promising 10 years ago.

Rating: 4/10 (31 August 2010)

What a let down. Due to the hype and exuberant reviews I had expected something akin to Eternal Sunshine or at least something not totally unlike The Matrix. Instead we get something like 'the Cell' without the lush imagery, but with plot holes so big that even Jorge Garcia would drop through them. So what is it that makes this film so mediocre.
1. The shoot outs and action scenes. Seriously, I've seen better in James Bond films from the early eighties, even if you deem this to be impossible. But what makes those scenes so utterly annoying is that there is no purpose to them whatsoever other than to appeal to people who like to see things go 'bang' and no doubt play first-person shooters in their bedrooms. Those guns don't propel the story forward a single inch.
2. The cast. Nothing happens between Leonardo and Marion. There is no spark, no chemistry, thus you can't really understand why Leonardo would consider staying in a dreamworld just to be together with his old flame that he doesn't seem to have any affection for when she was alive.
3. The Alibi cutie. If you eliminate Allen Page from the script, no-one would spot the difference. Honestly folks, if the architect of a dream landscape is so important and the wrong fabric of a bathmat can thwart the success of a mission, why don't we get any insight of how this whizz kid designs those dreamscapes and what makes her so indispensable. If we had any inkling what exactly she was doing there apart from looking pretty she would have been far less annoying.
4. The aforementioned holes in the plot. Too numerous to mention here, just think about this: if someone who has a dream in a dream and in the first dream he sits in a van that drops down a bridge, there is no logical way he would be weightless in the second dream cause physically he doesn't sit in the van and mentally he doesn't know about the moments without gravity. Dreams just don't work like that and it is an insult to peoples intelligence to suggest that they do.
But if all that was not enough, there is so much more inconsistency here, like for instance, why would a tycoon who has the money to buy up entire airlines and the power to overrule the judicial system in America be so utterly afraid of some healthy competition that he risks being lost in his dreamworld for more than thirty years?
I think 'good clean fun-loving popcorn movie' is just an euphemism for brainless mainstream crap from America but what is even worse is brainless mainstream crap that claims to be sophisticated. This film certainly is not.