Love It Or Hate It Indie Art House Flick

Rating: 4/10 (27 January 2005)

Maths genius Max Cohen finds himself being pressured by a a corporate gang who want to make profits on the stock market and a bunch of kabbala Jews who want to contact god
There that's the premise of PI . One that on the surface seems both entertaining and slightly bizarre , but I have to warn you that this is one of the most bizarre movies I've seen in a long time , try and imagine David Lynch on acid and you may just start to understand how strange this movie is . Did I use the word " Understand " in this review ? Believe me that word will be coming up frequently since I couldn't understand the plot at all , that's right this reviewer has the courage to admit that he doesn't understand maths , he doesn't understand kabbalistic dogma , or that doesn't understand what maths has got to do with the stock market since it's run by market forces not mathematical equations . I also didn't understand the scenes with Max stabbing a brain with a pencil or what he was doing sitting on a park bench at the end since he drove a power drill through his head in the penultimate scene .
If any of the above sounds so crazy you want to watch it because of the craziness factor be warned because much of the running time is taken up with Max sitting in front of a computer doing equations . That's right a man sitting in front of a computer same as you're doing right now as I sit in a computer typing up this review . Can there be anything as tedious or as unexciting or as uncinematic as watching someone in front of a computer ? The only scene of PI that elicts any type of excitement is when Max is saved from the corporate bad guys by the kabbalistic bad guys but apart from that the rest of PI revolves mainly around Max tapping away at his keyboard doing maths
Perhaps because of the dry subject matter director Darren Aronofsky does make the movie as bizarre as possible but it's nightmarish rather than involving , disturbing rather than entertaining , hateful rather than admirable with the cinematography , editing and musical score making this a very memorable piece of indie art house if for not all the wrong reasons then certainly not for all the right reasons - I've watched a great number of horror movies and very few of them have freaked me out as much as PI . Though if you look at the trivia section on this page you'll see that the production has a few interesting stories behind it so credit where it's due . But it still remains a movie that will be hated by a mainstream audience