Familiar concept badly executed

Rating: 1/10 (4 May 2011)

This is probably the worst movie i've seen in a while. There's a bunch of flaws that's I'll be discussing but the worst one is the unconvincing concept of the men with hats that never had any credibility at any point.
While watching I couldn't help but to be reminded of The Matrix (a film that DOES convince us with it's bizarre concept) because of the 'agents'. We're never given any backstory on these men with their hats who happen to control everything around them. Who are these people? Where did they get this power and how? We just have to assume that they have a book in which they see everything that goes on. Their hats allow them to open doors and teleport from place to place (similair again to the matrix but without the hats). The turning of the doorknobs to the left or right is also very important, but why?Why the hats? How does that make sense? Is there a device in the hats that allows them to do so? Is it magic? Never is any explanation given and it makes us ask all these questions because this is all happening in OUR world. To compare it to the Matrix again (where a lot of strange thing happen as well); in the Matrix the strange things that happen, happen in the Virtual world so it's much easier to assume that everything can happen there, because it's a VIRTUAL world. That's not the case in this film.
The second major flaw I noticed (which could be personal preference) is the unconvincing romance. The whole 'we we're meant to be together, it's fate' type of thing is unoriginal and predictable because you know what will happen at the end.
There were also plenty of corny and preachy dialogues which I could point out to you if I had a copy of the script, but it's not worth the effort. In essence this is a cheap B-movie produced with a Hollywood budget. This film is a bad execution of a known concept (previously seen in films like The Matrix, Enemy of the State) combined with a typical Hollywood romance.