Lowest Common Denominator

Rating: 1/10 (20 July 2009)

This film is terrible from start to finish and I am convinced that Ebert is being paid by the studios to give good ratings to the trash that is being spewed from Hollywood. This film is a prime example of what Hollywood has been doing for the past decade or so. Assign a hack of a director (Michael Mann), hire A-list actors (Bale & Depp), half-ass a story, offer little to no editing and expect the masses to accept this crap as a masterpiece! People need to wake up and realize that if they support this nonsense Hollywood will continue to make this trash. This is the lowest common denominator that has infiltrated our films, TV shows and music. People stop thinking for themselves expecting someone else to think for them and tell them what is good and what is not.
Still not convinced? Well let's see if I can help a little more since a lot of people on this site apparently liked this film, which is very sad really. OK, let's start with the script. There was not a single actor in this film that could deliver these lines in a believable way. It was as if the actors already knew that this movie wasn't working and they were there for a pay check. Editing, pretty sure if I had edited this movie I would want my name removed from the credits. This movie should have been 90 minutes long, not a minute longer. So many scenes should have been cut out completely or shorted by at least half. This leads me into the terribly underdeveloped plot. How many actors in this film looked, talked and acted in exactly the same way? I was confused by all of them b/c not a single one of them were developed in the story in anyway other than Depp, Bale and Cotillard. And if you were wondering why there were so many overly drawn out dramatic close-ups, its b/c there wasn't enough of a story written and Michael Mann can NOT make a movie less than 2 1/2 hours! It's like he wants to be Scorsese, but he just doesn't have the talent to be him.
The time has come to stop accepting this crap as filet mignon and calling it what it is, crap. Start thinking for yourselves and have a higher expectation for films, otherwise we'll only have Bruno to go see!