Adjustment Bureau is based on a Phillip K. Dick short story, I knew I would be in very good company.

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2011)

It's excused if you didn't see The Adjustment Bureau in theaters. After all, adult hard sci-fi thrillers aren't exactly everyone's cup of tea. Ones that feature plenty of men in fedoras though, thankfully, are right up my alley. And seeing as this particular Adjustment Bureau is based on a Phillip K. Dick short story, I knew I would be in very good company.
See, what those guys wearing great head gear do is they open up their little nifty CG booklets and when someone does something they're not supposed to, they use all manners of tricks to get them back on course. Like a traffic tie up to cause you miss an important meeting you would have been made to look foolish for, only so that later during a reschedule you end up nailing a promotion. Or maybe during a chase, you'll slip and fall and lose sight of the one you are making eyes for on the train only to never see them again. It's a destiny vs free choice type situation, and I'm pretty well tugged in by Matt Damon's charismatic character.
He does end up having one of those moments when this girl is exactly what he feels he must have in this world. And, of course, those pesky people in fedoras keep trying to remind him, subtlety and then more aggressively otherwise, that not only will he not continue on his path of political fame if he peruses her, she'll miss out on her opportunities as well. So the question becomes not necessarily destiny vs free choice, but what's more important, goals and ambition or love sweet love.
Things get a little ripe and over the top the further down the rabbit hole Mr. Damon travels. We're given more and more world building and rules as we go along. Sometimes it feels they're just making stuff up to satisfy a plot, and I suppose that's mostly what such fantasy flicks are required to do. But it seems to much at times and I'm still not quite sure how much I'm falling for the romance angle that progressively gets harder to root for.
Still, one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Or a gift movie that's actually very entertaining throughout and provides more than its fair share of nail-biting suspenseful moments in the midst of good old fashioned adult storytelling. Characters are great, it's filmed well, and I'm so wanting to buy myself a fedora now.