Interesting premise sacrificed to silly clichéd love story

Rating: 2/10 (18 February 2011)

I saw this at a preview screening. The premise of mysterious strangers controlling our destiny comes from the eccentric imagination of Phillip K. Dick; everything else in the movie is cookie cutter Hollywood fluff. None of the characters are remotely believable either in their everyday lives or in the nonchalant reactions to learning mind bending secrets about themselves and human destiny. What could have been an entertaining and creepy paranoid fantasy instead becomes a by the numbers sermon on the power of "true love" (which seems to refer to the infatuation you experience after spending a few hours engaging in cute banter and rolling in the hay with a virtual stranger). Has a number of unintentional laughs, not the least of which involves a character recounting a skewed history of the human race that ignores everything outside of Western Europe and America. Beyond all the silliness and the immaturity of the script, however, what really surprised me was how lazy it all felt. The performances were lackluster, the tense scenes were boring, the love story was passionless, the fantasy elements pedestrian. Towards the end I thought we might be at least being heading toward something really outrageous, but even that turned out to be a false hope.