Overrated, over-hyped, over here

Rating: 6/10 (31 December 2010)

Read the films ranked below Inception in the top 250...and weep. Have people lost their critical faculties? Yes, Inception is clever, multi-layered, complex and intellectually challenging. It is also heartless. It struggles to stimulate emotion. Cleverness replaces impact. Di Caprio's one-dimensional acting reinforces this sterility. From the first shot of a grim face we get the whole range of grim faces in a grim performance. He is grim about his kids, grim about the folding graphics, grim about his team, grim about the task in hand. Of the Matrix- plus effect I did like the folding city, but the ending was portentous to the point of tedium. One very good litmus test of the quality of a film is to analyse how many times the main protagonists have to explain the plot and at what length they have to explain it. Several characters explain the rules of the dream within a dream within a dream construct at the heart of the movie, with increasing loquaciousness and qualifications. This isn't plotting and it fails to create a genuine narrative drive. Compare it to so many of the films that come below this one in the rankings, Twelve Angry Men, Seven Samurai, Goodfellas, Casablanca, Once upon a time in America, Citizen Kane for goodness' sake. Don't even mention films like Shawshank and the Godfather which rank above it. This is a good film, possibly one of the better films of the year. It is a very long way from a great one.