Dull, drab, dreary, monotonous, boring, crass.

Rating: 1/10 (13 July 2009)

Of all the movies I've seen in 2009, this has to be the worst, despite also being undoubtedly one of the most expensive to make. It is tedious beyond belief. The characters are so one-dimensional, I could no longer care about their ultimate fates by the second hour of this snooze-fest. Christian Bale is so wooden you could make a barn door out of him. Johnny Depp turns out a pointless, throw-away caricature of his bad boy reputation. Marion Cotillard is the only actor in this film who rises above awful, and even she fights an ultimately futile battle with the leaden script and under-developed characterisation she has foisted upon her. The director and producer should be ashamed at having spent so much money on an end-product that is banal as it is charmless. You'd have to be a insecure teenager in thrall to mindless violence to get a kick from this movie, but by saying that I'm almost certainly doing an injustice to the majority of teenagers, who are probably just as likely to be bored rigid by this turgid dross as I was.