Most Overrated Movie of All Time

Rating: 1/10 (10 January 2011)

This is one of the most dreadful, pretentious movies I have ever seen. I was shaking with anger as I walked home afterward. Eastwood has taken his lifelong "you can't win", sour, nihilistic vision of life to ludicrous extremes in this contrived melodrama.
To be fair, the novel by Dennis Lehane is hopelessly flawed to begin with. Lehane likes to use big themes (the Holocaust in "Shutter Island", child molestation here) to give false importance to conventional, uninspired murder mysteries. This movie is NOT a serious examination of child molestation; it uses that horrific crime merely as an excuse to supply the story with a character (Dave) who can behave in wild, irrational ways and serve as an all-too-obvious suspect in the murder that takes place. Dave's actions have no psychological rationale; watch the scene where he's interrogated by the police (Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne) and he goes from hopelessly terrified to calculating in a few seconds, for no reason.
Eastwood compounds this by shooting everything in a slooooow, gray, somber, humorless style. He's so busy making a "statement" about how hopeless and unfair life is that he doesn't notice how unbelievable most of the devices are--like a a symbolic hulking teenager with an over-sized hockey stick, who would have been considered hokey in a silent movie. And I'm tired of hearing about all the "great acting". Eastwood sabotages his hardworking actors (especially Penn and Robbins) with sealed-off, overlong closeups (as if he were pre-selecting their Oscar clips). Poor Marcia Gay Harden, as Robbins' wife, is saddled with a scene where she has to walk, step-by-step, up a long staircase while staring "in horror" at Robbins in the hall below--and LIGHTNING STRIKES OUTSIDE! (What is this, "Dark Shadows"?) The best performances are the least acclaimed--Bacon and Fishburne's tough, unsentimental cops, and the great Laura Linney as Penn's wife (although even she is destroyed by a last minute, 180-degree turnaround Lady Macbeth scene which no one could pull off.) I suspect a lot of people feel the same way--this movie never really became a big hit, despite the overmarketing and Oscar hype. See a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical instead--it'll be a lot more believable.