Ultimately Flawed

Rating: 6/10 (13 February 2005)

I wasn't totally sure of how I would react to this film in terms of 'opinion on quality' as I hadn't seen the first film. Whether or not that would prove to be my downfall or not was just one of those things at the back of my mind telling me I might not enjoy this as much as I think I would've had it been the first film. As it turned out, I didn't enjoy as much as I estimated I would've.
The film has quite a large cast and many of the actors/actresses are back from the first film I discovered so in terms of presenting the characters and all round acting in general, I thought that it wouldn't have been very different to that of the first film. As it was, the acting was good with a fine nervous performance from Damon's character and Clooney and Pitt also do their best.
The humour is also just about up to standard. It's thrown in there amongst the pretty dismal plot where they try to make something relatively simple, uncontrollably difficult which not only falls on it's face but leaves bruise marks for all to see when it try's to get back up again. That saying, the jokes do roll along rather nicely and just manage to crop up at the right times giving the film a nice 'timed' feel to it. The Julia Robert's 'sketch' was quite a breath of fresh air in amongst all the confusion. It slowed everything right down and gave me not only a chance to catch my breath but to enjoy a rather surreal scene involving both real, fake and fake-real actors/actresses. Good stuff.
Of course with all the good acting, funny jokes and such aside; film's rely on plots and this one, as mentioned above, didn't really impress me. As I say, it try's to make something difficult when it was quite simple to start off with. It starts off all well and good with the 're-aquiring' of the gang but generally starts to fall away as it looses ground on people. They've obviously gone for the bold option here and credit to them for trying but it just didn't float my boat.
If decimals were a part of IMDb's voting system, then it would've been slightly higher than a six out of ten but in this case, the film deserves to be rounded down.