Hugely Overrated

Rating: 4/10 (2 August 2010)

I have rarely hated a movie more while I was watching it than this one, especially because I expected it to be very good to great. Despite an abundance of arresting visuals and and some good performances (especially by Madeline Cotillard), which save it from a really low rating, it is a bad movie in many ways. It is unbearably talky, overcomplicated, pretentious and boring. The last hour cycles the same four scenes over and over, and the only sign the movie is moving toward resolution is that the van the dreaming characters are riding in falls five feet closer to the river at each cycle. By then I was drifting in and out of consciousness like the characters. The film score pounds at you with incessant Teutonic heaviness. The main character is so thinly characterized that you have little reason to root for him. I like Leo much better when he plays a character in reality and stays out of dreams.