You can fool a lot of the people most of the time!

Rating: 2/10 (6 August 2010)

This film was supposed to knock my socks off! Well, I'm still wearing them, because this film was such a disappointment. I thought 'Memento' was brilliant, but 'Dark Knight' a con, although this was supposed to be a total Nolan film. It should have been his 'Heaven's Gate' ( a much better film by the way) but it has proved almost 'Titanic' (again a much better film). Indeed, the audience left the cinema asking each other 'did you enjoy it?' as if they thought it was rubbish, but had to find out whether it was OK to say it was! It was.
Let's face it, the plot is little more than a pretend heist movie on a par with 'Ocean's 12.' But it is hidden away in a complicated story of dreams and dreamworlds - three levels worth with each level allowing more time in it compared to reality! Gottit? You should do because Di Caprio spends acres of screen time explaining it to the complete and utter boredom of the audience. Cinema, Doctor K - I think not. It all boils down to finding out why the hero's wife died and how are the gang going to plant an idea in the head of a major industrialist (eg Inception). Following this? As the climax boils (in an extremely prosaic dreamworld hardly worth the effort and CGI) on three different levels - one a minibus falling off a bridge (interminably in slow motion), the second Tom Hardy's screen test for the remake of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' complete with ski shooters, Blofeld's alpine fortress, and an enemy that cannot kill a hero from five yards!, and the third, a legoland where Di Caprio's wife is skulking siren-like to lure him to stay forever - the film really creaks and shows its' paucity of vision, script, characters, and downright boringness! I have to excuse some of it because I needed the loo and could not get out of my row! Yes, I had a totem which kept me firmly in reality ( I knew how long we had to go by how far the minibus had to fall!).
And the plot holes - many, but the worst involved the Cillian Murphy getting killed in the second level which should have left him in mindless limbo on level 3, but he was dead there as well, while Ken Watanabe who died in level 2, became a very old man in level 3!!!! And right at the end, Cillian Murphy has been trained to resist dream thieves, and when he wakes up, he finds himself in the cabin with the gang but does not put two and two together and realise they are the real thieves having persuaded him in his dream otherwise!! Gettit? Don't bother, it was probably all Di Caprio's dream anyway - a load of old tosh that has Nolan laughing all the way to the bank, and many so-called serious critics facing the sack for lavishly overpraising a piece of mediocre tosh!!!