A cool concept produces a boring story

Rating: 6/10 (13 March 2011)

So what all can be said about The Adjustment Bureau? Honestly, not that much. This film wants to offer a lot, but overall it is just glaringly... average. It opens excitingly with the introduction of Matt Damon's character, David Norris, who is running for New York Senator. He is projected to be the winning candidate due to his immense popularity amongst the young voters. He has a sure victory lined up for him until a story about his rowdy college days surface. This article causes him to lose the race. While preparing to give his losing speech he meets a girl named Elise, played by Emily Blunt, in the restroom. After a brief romantic moment with her she leaves. David doesn't see her again for months until one day he happens to meet her on a bus. This time Elise gives David her number before he leaves. He goes into his office, only to discover that all of his coworkers are frozen in time and they are being "adjusted" by mysterious men in suits and hats. He learns that these men are adjusters and they control what humans call fate. After filling him in on their operations, the adjusters let David go and he then goes on a persistent quest to find Elise, the woman he is madly in love with but was never supposed to meet more than once.
The best adjective to describe this movie would sadly be... boring. It starts well and ends decently depending on how you look at it. But the majority of the movie is just plain dull. Not much happens throughout the middle of this film and all the story lines are drawn out too much. The characters are likable, but not terribly interesting. For the most part this film lacks any kind of interest or excitement until the climax which definitely will draw you back in.
The concept of this film is very neat and I enjoyed all of the subtle sci-fi aspects of the film. There's nothing glaringly sci-fi about it. The adjusters all look like normal people and they don't use any kind of exotic looking technology to do their work. They aren't dressed up in some bizarre alien garb and instead they wear suits and hats. The most sci-fi thing they do is travel between various points far away from each other through doors around the city. The unfortunate thing is, the actual plot that comes out of this intriguing concept is a pretty basic and lackluster romance story. The concept of this film can be related back to films like Dark City (1998) or The Matrix (1999). Those films tell vastly more interesting stories than the dull romance The Adjustment Bureau presents. I can't say that anything about the plot itself was horribly constructed or poorly done, it just wasn't that interesting. There are too many possibilities to go along with this concept to choose the one in this film.
About two thirds of the way into this film Terence Stamp's character Thompson is introduced. This is when the movie really starts to kick off again. Some important things are revealed along with Thompson's arrival and that made the film start to become a lot better. After Thompson is introduced the film rises and falls a few more times before it ends with a climax that is done very well for what it's worth. By that I mean it gets about as interesting as such a dull movie can get. It has an odd ending, but I think it worked for the most part. It wasn't terribly memorable (I say this because I'm having trouble remembering exactly how it ended right now) but it's about what you'd expect.
The Adjustment Bureau isn't a terrible film by any means. It's not great either. The filmmakers could have done so much more with this, but they refrained, and the result was a very boring film. This is not something I would ever watch again and in fact I don't think it is something I'll remember ever seeing in about a week. This is just one of those films that had a lot of potential but fell short and ended up being something that isn't painful to watch, but it isn't an exciting watch either.