Could have been better - too confusing - great beginning

Rating: 3/10 (28 January 2012)

I struggled to get a handle on this sci-fi romance. Is it the meeting of Damon & Blunt's cleft chins? Perhaps, in a reversal of the postmodern revisiting of the 1960s in Mad Men this is Roger Sterling (John Slattery)'s tinkering with the future? No, really, it's just another tepid Philip K Dick adaptation. At its time of release (this week) it's fashionable to say its Bourne (the Damon bit) meets Inception (the magic realism bit). However it bears resemblance to others too - Vanilla Sky (noumenal New York), Minority Report (more Dick), The Thomas Crown Affair (hats), The Matrix (predetermination) and even Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (sci- fi romance) to name a few (oh, go on then - Orson Welles' The Trial is also in there).
Like many mongrel films it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. Though Damon has charisma and John Slattery injects some realist ennui into his deus in machina role, damp, compliant phone-ins from Emily Blunt and Terence Stamp shackle the show. The shortcomings of the cast are entirely of a part with the production - the film doesn't know what it wants to be. It tries to be all of the above, jumping from a scene of *fun* through a door marked *thrills* and then on to another door marked *romance* without backing itself up. Diverting 5/10