What a bore

Rating: Null/10 (8 October 2010)

I had medium hopes for this movie before I watched it. They were soon dashed to pieces like Nancy Kerrigan's knee meeting a steel pipe. Except the Nancy Kerrigan story was interesting. I never thought they could make a story about bank robbers who lived fast, violent lives boring. Somehow, they found a way. The movie drags in many, many places in between action scenes. The pacing is horrible. There are so many long dull parts you'd swear you were watching Depp in Leaving Las Vegas.
Nothing happens for long periods of time, then all of a sudden there's an action scene. Unfortunately, the action is also boring or shot in a manner that makes watching it unbearable. The camera often zooms in too close to tell what's going on, like in the Quantum of Solace, but not quite that bad. The filmmaker also decided to shoot the movie in a grainy style, which makes it look more like it is from the 1940s or 50s or whatever, and also makes it even harder to tell what's going on. The worst part is that Johnny Depp's character thinks he's so cool and bad, when the movie makes it seem like he doesn't really do anything. There's some guy chasing him, but we barely see him at all. Mostly it's just Johnny Depp doing nothing and talking to some waitress or something trying really hard to impress her even though she's dumpy and not attractive.
There could be an interesting cops and robbers meets the Fugitive story in here, but the director instead told a boring love story: the story of how John Dillinger was in love with himself and tried to make a waitress think he was cool. This, apparently, was his life's goal. In the end, nobody cared, especially the audience. A much better period piece of a similar vein which I think also has Johnny Depp or possibly Jude Law, is Road to Perdition. If you want to watch something interesting, watch that. If you want video proof that before television, the internet, and video games the world was very boring, watch this piece of monkey crap.