Stupid, dull and frustrating

Rating: 1/10 (25 July 2010)

A mess about "mind pirates"...or something. They enter peoples minds, bend reality and are hired to help a man to change his dying fathers mind to get control of his estate...but there are OTHER people who are trying to stop them.
Wow! What a total disaster! This is one of those movies that make so little sense that people just assume they're not intelligent enough to "get it" and fall all over themselves praising it. This movie is not some revolutionary trend setter--does anyone remember "The Matrix" from 20 year ago? Also it sets up the rules of what's going on at the beginning. That's fine but they're thrown at you so fast and furious (with NO explanation) that I was totally lost. Then, after establishing the rules, they CHANGE them for no other reason than to confuse the plot and throw viewers off. THEN they introduce new rules when we're well into the movie! That's not clever or intriguing--it's playing with the viewers mind and deliberately making them lost and confused. To make it worse the acting pretty much sucks. Ellen Page is horrendous (and her character is never fully introduced or explained) and Joseph Godron-Levitt sleepwalks through his role. DiCaprio (who I THOUGHT was a good actor) is terrible. He gives yet another performance of a man who's tortured by some dark past and trying to get through it. He's done this many times before ("Revolutionary Road", "Shutter Island"). Can't he do anything else? Also when he breaks loose and start yelling I didn't believe it for one second and I couldn't take it seriously. I've seen that before! The admittedly great special effects can't help. I walked out after 90 minutes. The movie is constantly pulling the rug out from under the viewers and I got this smug attitude that the filmmakers were having a fun time playing with the viewers and thinking they were smarter than they actually were. Dull, annoying and very full of itself. Don't bother.