Same old lame Hollywood tripe

Rating: 3/10 (3 August 2010)

It beggars belief how both critics and movie-goers have been won over by this pseudo-intellectual piece of garbage. Really world? I thought better of you.
There were three key problems for me in this movie. The first was the love story. Blah. I mean really, BLAH. This was an action based thriller, whose ultimate fate was rested on DiCaprio's characters obsession with his dead wife. Ultimately the film could have achieved its original thought provoking intentions had it dumped the obligatory Hollywood love story entirely.
My second issue with this movie was the teams motivation for going into the energy tycoons son was weak. If you really want to get your audience thinking, why not try to get a politician to push through a new law, or stop the production of nuclear warheads? Why focus an entire movie, so well shot and expertly produced, in trying to get someone to break down a business? Finally, and maybe this was just me because I was disconnecting with the film at this point, but some of the dialogue was just way too cheesy and over the top. "A dream within a dream within a dream? It's never been done before!" All in all a big let down, mainly because the concept was great and some of the scenes were incredibly filmed, yet the producers bowed to the same old Hollywood model. Not all of us need to see a love story in order to engage our brains y'know.