Good idea but crushed ms by poor acting

Rating: 8/10 (7 August 2010)

Saw it in cinemas a week after opening night or so. I couldn't keep off the 8 vote though i feel its a bit high.
Short about the movie before i review it. Cobb - the main character, played by Leonardo Di Caprio, is a former architect and accused for throwing his wife out the window - literally, is trying to clean his record with the police by doing a job for a powerful acquaintance(Ken Watanabe - Saito) that involves dreamexorcism and the like. While struggling with the mystic relationship with his former wife he puts together a team of specialists to handle the job. Ellen Page plays Ariadne, the gifted young architect. Tom Hardy plays Eames, the 'impersonator' if you will. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur, in charge of the technical aspects. They are all there to trick Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) big time. By taking him through three levels of dreaming they hope to alter the very core of his motivation and change his future plans as a result. You will have the rest explained to you, don't worry about that.
I've heard people saying they have to watch the movie 3-4 times before understanding the story in full. In my opinion you have almost everything explained to you just as it happens. This comes through in discussions among the characters or with the camera itself. To clarify, if you have to think about something for a moment because you didn't understand it fully the characters in the movie interrupts your thought process by explaining exactly what just happened. I don't mean to sound arrogant at all but I have this problem with movies that tries to reach out to everyone at once. If the aim is to include every watcher they obviously have to explain things over and over in different ways. I totally get that but it doesn't fit well with a movie like this one, it takes all the thought provocation and mysticism out.
I don't know if it was the overall Hollywood-humorous-mood of the movie that made it difficult for me to take the characters seriously or if it was just poor portraiting from the actors. It seemed more of a kindergarten with Leonardo, the grownup, running around trying to calm down the kids - Ellen and Joseph. More of a Harry Potter cast feeling to it Im afraid. Im also disappointed to say that Leo had his worst performance in a long time, if not ever. I'd think the manuscript was aiming for a very emotionally moving struggle for the main character. However Cobbs little misadventures wasn't moving me one inch. Leos acting felt empty and almost fake.
Nolan tries to feed the watcher with a bit of everything, romance, humour, action, sci-fi and psychology all at the same time but falls short in every area. The actionscenes and animations are great though, in line with almost all new movies from Hollywood these days. This to me unfortunately makes Inception more of a hardcore actionmovie than the thought provoking masterpiece I was hoping for.
Now if you are one not particularly annoyed by areas discussed above you wont be disappointed with Inception, you wont be anyway. The ideas behind it are new, very interesting and thought provoking. I think people will start investigating and experimenting with their dreams just a bit more after seeing Inception.
I know I do, and I like it :)