Mediocre - at best. And I'm easy to please...

Rating: 3/10 (5 July 2009)

This will go in my books as one of those movies that was so "almost there". On the face of it the movie has all the right ingredients, but it fails to come together to make a meaningful movie experience. The acting is largely flawless, but the cast is let down by a script that delivers shockingly bad lines at times. The cinematography sits in an uncomfortable space between traditional movie and docu-drama with disjointed use of traditional film flow and handy-cam scenes. The soundtrack went largely unnoticed. Filming in digital video for such a complex movie was also a mistake as it killed the atmosphere of some critical scenes.
You never really get absorbed into the movie because at every step you are working hard to fall in step with it, but its stochastic storytelling and distracting mistakes/errors of judgment leave a plethora of questions and a headache.
Overall watching the movie was a very frustrating experience. As I followed it I willed the movie to pull through and succeed, instead it flatfootedly dragged me through it for over two hours.
My three stars are for the obvious effort the cast and crew put into it, not for the final product. It is an ample example of style over substance.