Promising start - but ultimately disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (23 November 2008)

After a promising first two thirds that seemed to be building up towards a gripping climax, the final third of the movie goes off at something of a tangent and gets mired in tiresome pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectual pondering and posturing.
Various 'whys and wherefores' are left unexplained, and far from delivering a "heart-stopping final moment" as the DVD cover blurb claims, the movie ends very abruptly with one of the main characters sitting at his breakfast table, droning on about some dream he's had.
In my opinion the 8+ overall rating here greatly flatters this movie, and I can only put such a high score down at least in part to many voters experiencing an "emperor's new clothes" moment along the lines of "Coen Brothers = widely regarded as 'serious film-makers' = must be good then - even though really it degenerated into nebulous twaddle".