Wonderful introduction to a dream falters somewhat into action scenes

Rating: 9/10 (20 November 2014)

I've seen Inception for several times now, and while I understand the plot and what's going on better I also find it dragging slightly during it's final hour. With that I mean the action scenes, or dream scenes.
The movie and what is to come is introduced nicely. In the beginning we have already multiple dream layers and the lead characters: Dom, Arthur, Saito and Mal (who is very important character even if not real). Mal can be described as the movie's antagonist, because she lives in Dom's dreams and subconscious and can appear anywhere in the dream. She acts as an variable in the already highly fragile dream scenes and is the only scary aspect of the film. Not because Mal is scary in her presence, she must have been lovely, but because her reflection resembles Dom's bitterness and remorse.
Dom Cobb is played brilliantly by Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe is great as Saito, and Cillian Myrphy is pretty good in the role of a large corporation's young and insecure CEO. All the rest seemed OK. The biggest treat of the film are the visuals, or CGI. You either like or hate the dream scenes since they seem very empty and sterile which I think is the intention, because they are designed a task in mind by a human, an architect, to be effective and much like labyrinths (a shape I didn't notice elsewhere but in the hotel scene). The "heist", so to speak, happens in these dream scenes, or layers, that remind me a lot like first person shooter battle arenas. These scenes propably won't amaze anyone by their design. The visual effects on the other hand are very clever and huge.
Inception bends the borders of reality and makes you think if a dream space is more real and acceptable than reality, which is why Mal killed herself to escape from reality. She was wrong doing so, and Dom can't get over it and blames himself. That's why Dom recreates Mal from his memory to meet her in his own dream space and to settle with her. Ariadne is the only person who really understands the danger in that, but they still blunder into very risky mission, where of course everything goes wrong.
The biggest problem for me in Inception, which is otherwise highly entertaining and clever film, are the generic James Bond action scenes, that don't feel very dream-like and at the same time are not real either. I didn't sense any danger during them, because the characters can't die. Additionally, the time line appears warped while the van is falling from bridge, since it seems to take forever, and the loud music doesn't really help in creating suspense but instead irritates you and feels forced.
The meaning of "kick" seemed to alter during the film. At first it wakes you up when free-falling, later it only works during impact. Weird. Maybe it's because of the highly effective drug they used in the final mission and the kick must being synchronized, or whatever.
That's probably nitpicking, because I value the bold effort from Nolan. The script must have been pain to write because of it's complexity, but he managed to execute it brilliantly. I think Inception is 2010's Matrix and probably his best film.